day 7 Karnac Temple

Feb 18 day 7 Karnac Temple

Karnac Temple today, just a lazy start as the temple is only a few minutes from the hotel and we have an afternoon flight home.

Karnac Temple is the single largest religious site on the entire planet earth and it is huge. It is surprisingly unfinished, I don’t mean because it’s a ruin. No if you look at it from the front, the stonework is still rough, there are no reliefs carved on the pylons and the mud brick ramp has been left in situ by the ancients.

Everywhere you turn there is a different perspective showing columns, obelisks’ (is that a plural?) There are two obelisks of red granite 22m high to Hapsetshut, one still standing and one felled by an earthquake, these were dedicated to Amun-Ra and were left untouched by her successor Amenhotep who couldn’t touch them to destroy them, so he had them both encased in sandstone blocks instead.

There’s a large granite scarab beetle on a plinth that was found somewhere else but placed here because there are more tourists. There is a myth about this beetle that if a woman wishes to conceive she should walk around it, without talking, 7 times and if she wants to marry then only three times, we saw a couple of Chinese girls trying this but I don’t’ think anything will happen to them because the laughed and joked about it.

Our guide was really good and showed us the best bits, you know the places that the tourists barely even glance at before moving on.