Construction at Karnak, near modern Luxor, began around 1970 BC under the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret I and continued until the Ptolemaic era around 30 BC, with roughly 30 pharaohs adding, altering, and erasing work. The Egyptians called it Ipet-isut, the most select of places, while the modern name comes from the nearby village of El Karnak, Arabic for fortified village. Its centerpiece, the Precinct of Amun-Re, holds the Great Hypostyle Hall: 1.2 acres, 134 columns in 16 rows, with 12 central columns 69 feet tall. Sandstone came 100 miles by barge from Gebel el-Silsila during the Nile flood, and 70 ton architraves were hauled up mud brick ramps on timber sleds over wetted sand.

The Precinct of Mut honored a mother goddess who absorbed Sekhmet, Bastet, Menhit, and Nekhbet as Thebes grew. A Johns Hopkins team found evidence of a festival of drunkenness reenacting the myth in which Ra tricked the bloodthirsty Sekhmet with red beer. After Akhenaten built a temple to the Aten beside the Amun precinct, the Amun priesthood dismantled it and used its blocks as fill inside later pylons. In 356 AD Emperor Constantius II ordered pagan temples closed, and Christians later set up a Coptic church in the festival hall of Thutmose III.

• An unfinished pillar shows carving was done after blocks were lifted into place
• The main shrine was aligned to catch the sun on the winter solstice
• Hatshepsut built a porch of drunkenness to hold festival crowds
• Medieval European maps wrongly placed Thebes near Memphis, close to modern Cairo
• A Venetian described the ruins in 1589, Capuchin monks recorded the name Karnak in 1668, and Napoleon’s 1798 to 1799 expedition finally documented it