The Festival the Building Was Built For

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.