Old: Islam spread to Egypt not long after the times of Mohammed. This is a 13th century mosque, which was built on an earlier Christian church, which was unwittingly built on the top of the buried Luxor Temple. You can see the mosque’s doors, which opened to the old “street” level, which is now a solid two stories above the ground of the excavated temple:
Ancient: (Well, ancient-ish.) The remains of the Roman emperor Dicoletian, from the 3rd century A.D., in the rear of the temple.
The Romans plastered over the hieroglyphs with what, in any other context, would be a magnificent Roman painting. The Luxor Temple was used as a Roman legionary fortress, and they left their own stamp on the place. I love how you can see the faces and the vague etchings of the hieroglyphs in the same picture. It’s not “pure,” but as I’ve discussed previously on my blog…it’s the mixing that makes it interesting. It’s the friction of history, documented in front of our eyes. How many places do you get to see traces of two bygone empires this way?
We wandered around below while the muezzin’s call to prayer wafted above us.
Luxor Temple was built between 1600 and 1100 BC. It was connected by the much larger Karnak Temple by a several kilometers-long road lined with sphinxes. They’ve started to restore a portion of the “Avenue of Sphinxes” which is now very dramatically lit in the evenings (as is the temple).
The Luxor Temple played an important role in ancient Egyptian barque festivals. Here is a hieroglyph of dancing/backflips– guess there was a lot to celebrate!
