The history of the Karnak complex is largely the history of
Thebes and its changing role in the culture. Religious centers varied by region, and when a new capital of the unified culture was established, the religious centers in that area gained prominence. The city of Thebes does not appear to have been of great significance before the
Eleventh Dynasty and previous temple building there would have been relatively small, with shrines being dedicated to the early deities of Thebes, the Earth goddess
Mut and
Montu. Early building was destroyed by invaders. The earliest known artifact found in the area of the temple is a small, eight-sided column from the Eleventh Dynasty, which mentions Amun-Re. Amun (sometimes called Amen) was long the local
tutelary deity of Thebes. He was identified with the ram and the goose. The Egyptian meaning of Amun is "hidden" or the "hidden god". Major construction work in the Precinct of Amun-Re took place during the
Eighteenth Dynasty, when Thebes became the capital of the unified Ancient Egypt. Almost every pharaoh of that dynasty added something to the temple site.
Thutmose I erected an enclosure wall connecting the Fourth and Fifth pylons, which comprise the earliest part of the temple still standing
in situ.
Hatshepsut had monuments constructed and also restored the original
Precinct of Mut, that had been ravaged by the foreign rulers during the
Hyksos occupation. She had twin
obelisks, at the time the tallest in the world, erected at the entrance to the temple. One still stands, as the
second-tallest ancient obelisk still standing on Earth; the other has toppled and is broken. Another of her projects at the site, Karnak's Red Chapel or
Chapelle Rouge, was intended as a
barque shrine and originally may have stood between her two obelisks. She later ordered the construction of two more obelisks to celebrate her sixteenth year as pharaoh; one of the obelisks broke during construction, and thus, a third was constructed to replace it. The broken obelisk was left at its quarrying site in
Aswan, where it still remains. Known as
the unfinished obelisk, it provides evidence of how obelisks were quarried. (1857, Rijksmuseum, The Netherlands) Construction of the
Great Hypostyle Hall also may have begun during the Eighteenth Dynasty (although most new building was undertaken under
Seti I and
Ramesses II in the Nineteenth).
Merneptah, also of the Nineteenth Dynasty, commemorated his victories over the
Sea Peoples on the walls of the
Cachette Court, the start of the processional route (also known as the
Avenue of Sphinxes) to the
Luxor Temple. The last major change to the Precinct of Amun-Re's layout was the addition of the First Pylon and the massive enclosure walls that surround the precinct, both constructed by
Nectanebo I of the
Thirtieth Dynasty. Ancient Greek and Roman writers wrote about a range of monuments in
Upper Egypt and
Nubia, including Karnak, Luxor temple, the
Colossi of Memnon,
Esna,
Edfu,
Kom Ombo,
Philae, and others. In 323 AD, Roman emperor
Constantine the Great recognized the Christian religion, and in 356
Constantius II ordered the closing of
pagan temples throughout the Roman empire, into which Egypt had been annexed in 30 BC. Karnak was by this time mostly abandoned, and Christian churches were founded among the ruins, the most famous example of this is the reuse of the
Festival Hall of Thutmose III's central hall, where painted decorations of saints and
Coptic inscriptions can still be seen.
European knowledge of Karnak Thebes' exact placement was unknown in medieval Europe, though both
Herodotus and
Strabo give the exact location of Thebes and how long up the
Nile one must travel to reach it. Maps of Egypt, based on the 2nd century
Claudius Ptolemaeus' mammoth work
Geographia, had been circulating in Europe since the late 14th century, all of them showing Thebes' (Diospolis) location. Despite this, several European authors of the 15th and 16th centuries who visited only
Lower Egypt and published their travel accounts, such as
Joos van Ghistele and
André Thévet, put Thebes in or close to
Memphis. in 1828 The first European description of the Karnak temple complex was by an unknown Venetian in 1589 and is housed in the
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, although his account gives no name for the complex. Karnak ("Carnac") as a village name, and name of the complex, is first attested in 1668, when two
capuchin missionary brothers, Protais and Charles François d'Orléans, travelled though the area. Protais' writing about their travel was published by
Melchisédech Thévenot (
Relations de divers voyages curieux, 1670s–1696 editions) and
Johann Michael Vansleb (
The Present State of Egypt, 1678). The first drawing of Karnak is found in
Paul Lucas' travel account of 1704, (
Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas au Levant). It is rather inaccurate, and can be quite confusing to modern eyes. Lucas travelled in Egypt during 1699–1703. The drawing shows a mixture of the Precinct of Amun-Re and the Precinct of Montu, based on a complex confined by the three huge Ptolemaic gateways of
Ptolemy III Euergetes /
Ptolemy IV Philopator, and the massive long, high and thick, First Pylon of the Precinct of Amun-Re. Karnak was visited and described in succession by
Claude Sicard and his travel companion Pierre Laurent Pincia (1718 and 1720–21),
Granger (1731),
Frederick Louis Norden (1737–38),
Richard Pococke (1738),
James Bruce (1769),
Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1777),
William George Browne (1792–93), and finally by a number of scientists of the Napoleon expedition, including
Vivant Denon, during 1798–1799.
Claude-Étienne Savary describes the complex in rather great detail in his work of 1785; especially in light of the fact that it is a fictional account of a pretend journey to Upper Egypt, composed out of information from other travellers. Savary did visit
Lower Egypt in 1777–78, and published a work about that too. ==Main parts==