Luxor Temple

Luxor Temple is not designed for daily worship by a congregation. It is designed for one procession a year to arrive at it. During the Opet festival the portable images of Amun, Mut and Khonsu were carried out of Karnak in shrines shaped like boats, taken along the river or down the avenue of sphinxes that links the two temples, and brought into the inner rooms at Luxor. What happened there was not public. The sequence of courts and halls narrows and darkens as it goes, so that the crowd, the priests and finally a very few people each stopped at a different point, and the rite at the end concerned the renewal of the king's power.

Reliefs in the temple present the reigning king as conceived by the god, which makes the festival an annual restatement of why he was entitled to rule. The two things are the same event seen from different ends: outside, a public holiday with music, offerings and free bread and beer distributed to the crowd; inside, a closed ceremony that renewed a claim about kingship. Egyptian temples generally worked in this way, and Luxor is the clearest surviving example of it, because the processional route, the way stations along it and the rooms at the end all still stand.

Very few ancient temples anywhere have been in continuous religious use, in one form or another, for three and a half thousand years. Luxor is one. When Roman troops were stationed at Thebes the temple was taken into a legionary fortress and part of the hall behind the first court was plastered over and repainted as a shrine of the imperial cult, so that Roman emperors were honoured in a room built for Amun. Christian communities later built churches inside the enclosure. A mosque was raised over the accumulated debris in the medieval period, dedicated to a local holy man, and it is still in use.

Because the ground level rose over the centuries, its entrance now stands well above the ancient floor, and when nineteenth and twentieth century excavation cleared the temple down to its original pavement the mosque was left standing on the higher level, which is why it appears today to hover part way up the wall. The atlas records the sequence without arranging it as a story of replacement. Each of the four uses was a live religion practised by people who had inherited the building from someone else, and the mosque is the current one. Preservation decisions at the site have had to weigh the ancient fabric against a functioning place of worship, and the surviving arrangement is the compromise that was reached.