Karnak Temple: the map, the history and what to see in the largest religious complex of antiquity

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Karnak is the largest religious complex of the ancient world: about 250 acres (100 hectares) of temples, pylons, obelisks, courts and a sacred lake on the east bank of the Nile at Luxor, ancient Thebes, built and rebuilt by some thirty pharaohs over two thousand years, from the Middle Kingdom around 2000 BC to the Ptolemies in the 1st century BC. Its heart is the Temple of Amun-Ra, the state god of the New Kingdom, whose Great Hypostyle Hall of 134 columns, 54,000 square feet (5,000 m²) under a stone roof, is the largest room of any ancient temple. Nothing at Karnak was planned as a whole; each king added a pylon, a court or an obelisk in front of or beside what stood before, so the map is a history book read from the inside out. Below: the map as a walk, the builders in order, the engineering of the hall, the other precincts, and what has been found there since excavation began in 1895. Karnak is in the Ancient temples of the world collection with the other temples of Thebes.

The map: a walk from west to east

1. The avenue of sphinxes. A paved road lined with ram-headed sphinxes, sacred to Amun, runs 1.7 miles (2.7 km) south to Luxor Temple; it was fully re-excavated and reopened in 2021. A quay and a short avenue lead to the first pylon.
2. The first pylon. The largest gateway in Egypt, 370 feet (113 m) wide and 130 feet (40 m) high, and unfinished: the mud-brick construction ramp used to build it still lies against its inner face. Built under the 30th Dynasty in the 4th century BC, it is the youngest major part of the temple.
3. The great court. The largest court, with the kiosk of Taharqa, a Nubian pharaoh of the 7th century BC, in its centre, the temple of Seti II and the temple of Ramesses III along its sides, and a colossus of Ramesses II by the second pylon.
4. The second pylon and the Great Hypostyle Hall. Through the pylon of Horemheb into the hall: 134 columns in 16 rows, the central 12 of them 69 feet (21 m) high with open papyrus capitals 50 feet around, the rest 43 feet (13 m) with closed buds, the difference in height filled by stone window grilles that once lit the central aisle. Begun by Seti I and finished by Ramesses II around 1250 BC; the reliefs of Seti's wars are on the north outer wall.
5. The obelisks. Beyond the third pylon, the obelisk of Thutmose I, 71 feet (21.7 m), and past the fourth pylon the obelisk of Hatshepsut, 97 feet (29.5 m) and 320 tons, the tallest standing in Egypt, cut at Aswan in seven months according to its own inscription; its twin lies broken by the sacred lake. Thutmose III walled Hatshepsut's obelisks up after her death; the walls preserved the inscriptions.
6. The central sanctuaries. The granite bark shrine of Philip Arrhidaeus, Alexander the Great's half-brother, on the site of Thutmose III's, where the god's boat rested; the Middle Kingdom court beyond it, the oldest part, now a platform of foundations.
7. The festival hall of Thutmose III. A hall of columns shaped like tent poles, with the "botanical garden" room carved with the plants and animals he brought back from Syria.
8. The sacred lake. 400 by 250 feet (120 by 77 m), stone-lined, fed by groundwater, where priests washed and sacred geese were kept; beside it a giant scarab of Amenhotep III that visitors circle for luck, and the fallen top of Hatshepsut's second obelisk.
9. The southern axis. Four more pylons, the seventh to tenth, run south from the sanctuary toward the precinct of Mut, with the cachette court where 17,000 bronzes and 800 statues were found buried in 1903.

Karnak overview.

Who built it, in order

• Middle Kingdom, about 2000–1700 BC. Senusret I built the first stone temple of Amun, of which a reconstructed white chapel survives in the open-air museum; Thebes was then a provincial town.
• 18th Dynasty, about 1550–1300 BC. Thebes became the capital and Amun the state god. Thutmose I built the fourth and fifth pylons and the first obelisks; Hatshepsut her obelisks and red chapel; Thutmose III the festival hall, the sixth and seventh pylons and the walls that hid Hatshepsut's monuments; Amenhotep III the third pylon and the temple of Mut, and began the Hypostyle Hall's frame. Akhenaten built a temple to the sun disc east of Karnak that his successors demolished; its 40,000 blocks, the talatat, were found reused as filling in later pylons.
• 19th Dynasty, about 1300–1190 BC. Seti I and Ramesses II built and decorated the Great Hypostyle Hall; Ramesses II added the colossi and the first parts of the avenue of sphinxes; Seti II and Ramesses III their small temples in the first court.
• Later kings, 1000 BC–30 BC. Shoshenq I of the 22nd Dynasty built the great court and recorded his campaign in Israel on the Bubastite portal; Taharqa the kiosk; the 30th Dynasty the first pylon and the enclosure wall; the Ptolemies gates and chapels. Building stopped under Rome; the temple closed in the 4th century AD, and a Coptic church was built in the festival hall.

How the Great Hypostyle Hall was built

The columns are drums of sandstone from the quarries of Gebel el-Silsila, 100 miles upriver, stacked on foundations of stone and sand and joined with mortar; the largest drums weigh several tons. They were raised by building the hall full of earth as the columns rose, a ramp that grew with the work, then digging the fill out and carving the reliefs from the top down as the earth was removed, which is why the columns are so close together: they had to be, to carry the stone roof, whose architraves span only about 10 feet. The roof, of slabs weighing up to 70 tons, sat on the architraves 80 feet up; the clerestory windows between the tall central columns and the lower side columns lit the axis and left the aisles in gloom, a deliberate progression from light to darkness toward the sanctuary. The columns were painted, and traces of colour survive under the capitals. Several columns leaned dangerously after the flood of 1899 brought eleven of them down; Georges Legrain rebuilt them, and the hall has been under continuous conservation since. The Great Hypostyle Hall.

The other precincts

Karnak is four enclosures. The precinct of Amun is the one visitors see. South of it, joined by an avenue of sphinxes, the precinct of Mut, Amun's consort, with a horseshoe-shaped sacred lake and hundreds of black granite statues of the lion goddess Sekhmet, 730 of them originally, set up by Amenhotep III. North, the precinct of Montu, the war god of Thebes, small and closed to visitors. East, the demolished temple of the Aten. Across the river on the west bank lie the mortuary temples of the same kings, Hatshepsut's at Deir el-Bahari, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu and the Colossi of Memnon, and the Valley of the Kings, where the pharaohs who built Karnak were buried.

What Karnak was for

A temple of Amun was not a place for a congregation but the god's house and estate. The public came only as far as the courts on festival days; priests alone entered the halls, and only the king or high priest the sanctuary, where the god's statue was washed, dressed and fed each day. The temple owned land, herds, mines and ships across Egypt: a papyrus of Ramesses III's reign gives Amun's estate about 86,000 workers and 2,400 square miles of fields, a tenth of the country. On the Opet festival the god's statue travelled by bark to Luxor and back along the avenue of sphinxes; on the Beautiful Festival of the Valley it crossed to the tombs on the west bank. The scale of Karnak is the scale of that wealth, and its end came when the high priests of Amun became kings in their own right around 1070 BC and the estate was broken up.

What has been found

Excavation began in 1895 under Georges Legrain and continues under the Franco-Egyptian Centre founded in 1967. The Karnak cachette of 1903–1905, a pit in the court south of the seventh pylon, yielded about 800 stone statues and 17,000 bronzes, buried by priests clearing the temple in the Ptolemaic period; the finest are in Cairo and Luxor. The talatat blocks of Akhenaten's demolished temple, 40,000 of them pulled from the ninth pylon, were reassembled into wall scenes by computer in the 1960s. The White Chapel of Senusret I and the Red Chapel of Hatshepsut were rebuilt from blocks found inside the third pylon. In 2021 the avenue of sphinxes was reopened along its whole length after fifty years of excavation. Karnak, Luxor and the Theban necropolis have been a World Heritage Site since 1979.

What is in the archive

Karnak and Luxor are in the Ancient temples of the world collection with the west-bank temples of Thebes and the other temples of Egypt from Djoser to Philae. For Ramesses II's other great work see Abu Simbel; for the oldest sanctuaries anywhere, the oldest temples in the world.

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