Thebes

Amun began as a local god of Waset whose name means something like the hidden one, and rose with the fortunes of the family that expelled the Hyksos and founded the New Kingdom. Merged with the sun god as Amun-Ra, he became the state deity of an empire, and his house at Karnak was enlarged by nearly every king for some two thousand years, which makes it less a building than an accumulation. Its hypostyle hall holds one hundred and thirty four columns; its sacred lake supplied the water for the priests' washings; and successive pylons record the campaigns that paid for the next wing.

Egyptian temples were not congregational. The god lived in a dark shrine, was washed, dressed, fed and censed daily by priests on duty in rotation, and ordinary people did not go in. What they saw were the festivals. At Opet, in the season of inundation, the barque of Amun was carried or towed from Karnak to Luxor along an avenue of sphinxes for a stay of weeks, in a rite bound up with the renewal of the king's own vital force. At the Beautiful Festival of the Valley the god crossed to the west bank to visit the mortuary temples, and families spent the night at the tombs of their dead with food, drink and flowers.

The barque was also an oracle. Questions were put to it as it was carried, and the answer was read from its movement, forward or back, in the hands of the bearers. Records survive of property disputes, appointments and accusations of theft decided this way.

Across the river lay the city of the dead: rock cut royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, a separate valley for queens, private tombs in the hillside, and a line of mortuary temples along the edge of the cultivation where the cult of each dead king was maintained. Hatshepsut's terraced temple at Deir el-Bahari, the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu are the best preserved. Behind them lay Deir el-Medina, the walled village of the workmen who cut and painted the tombs, whose rubbish heaps produced thousands of ostraca: work rosters, letters, wills, records of the first recorded strike, and prayers.

Those prayers matter for the history of religion. They are personal in a way official texts are not, addressed to a deified Amenhotep I who served as the village oracle, to Meretseger the cobra goddess of the peak, and to Amun as the one who comes at the voice of the poor man. Some confess a fault and accept blindness or sickness as the god's answer, which is the clearest evidence Egypt has left of individual religious feeling.

The estates of Amun grew until they held a substantial share of the land, livestock and labour of Egypt. Akhenaten's move to a new capital and his attack on Amun's name in the fourteenth century BCE was answered after his death by a restoration and by the erasure of his own. By the end of the New Kingdom the High Priest of Amun at Karnak was writing his name in a royal cartouche and governing the south, while a king ruled from the delta, and the office of God's Wife of Amun, held by a royal woman, carried its own great wealth.