Three Religions in One Set of Walls

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.