Temple estates did not grow by accident. Kings deliberately enriched them, granting land, captives and tribute to the great gods in gratitude for military victories or simply as an ordinary expression of royal piety, and each grant was, in principle, permanent and irrevocable, since it belonged to the god rather than to the crown. Over centuries of New Kingdom warfare and conquest, this steady one-directional flow concentrated an enormous share of Egypt's wealth in the hands of a small number of temple estates, none more so than the estate of Amun-Ra at Karnak in Thebes, whose high priesthood came to control land, workshops and personnel on a scale that at points rivaled the resources of the royal palace itself.
By the closing decades of the New Kingdom this had become a genuine political problem rather than a purely religious success story. The high priests of Amun accumulated enough independent economic and military standing that, following the death of Ramesses XI, one of their own effectively governed Upper Egypt as a rival center of power to the nominal king in the north, a split conventionally treated as marking the start of the Third Intermediate Period. The temple estate's religious purpose, sustaining the god's cult forever through inalienable endowment, had produced, as an unintended side effect, one of the most consequential political fractures in later Egyptian history.