Luxor Temple

What is actually there

On the east bank of the Nile, in the middle of the modern town of Luxor, a temple that has never stopped being used. The ancient Egyptians called it Ipet-resyt, the southern sanctuary. Construction began around 1390 BCE under Amenhotep III, who built the inner sanctuary and the Great Colonnade. Tutankhamun and Horemheb finished decorating that colonnade a generation later. Ramesses II then added the whole entrance sequence: a peristyle court, a pylon sixty-five metres wide carved with his account of the Battle of Kadesh, and colossal statues of himself flanking the gate.

Two granite obelisks originally stood in front of that pylon. One is still there. The other has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris since 1836, a gift from Muhammad Ali Pasha, shipped down the Nile and across the Mediterranean at a cost that reportedly ran into millions of francs.

The temple was built for one event above all others: the Opet Festival. Once a year, the statues of Amun, his wife Mut, and their son Khonsu were carried from Karnak Temple to Luxor, along a processional avenue lined with sphinxes that ran for roughly two and a half kilometres. The point of the festival, as far as it can be reconstructed, was the renewal of the king's divine authority. It is carved in detail on the Colonnade walls: priests, musicians, boats on the water.

Then it kept getting reused, by everyone who came after.

Alexander the Great had a shrine built inside claiming his own coronation here, though the sources doubt he personally travelled this far south. By the late third century CE the Romans had folded the temple into a legionary fort and were worshipping the emperor in a converted hall; the painted plaster from that period is still visible, badly damaged, on the walls. Christian communities later built a church inside the same courtyard. In the thirteenth century, when centuries of Nile silt had buried most of the temple up to roof height, a mosque was built on top of the remaining high ground, dedicated to a Sufi saint named Abu al-Haggag, who died in 1245. Nobody moved the mosque when the temple was excavated beneath it. It is still an active place of worship today, standing on a ledge partway up the temple's own accumulated debris.

Systematic excavation began in 1884 under the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, uncovering courts and colonnades that had been buried under a village for centuries.

The sky here

This is the part I did not expect to find, and it is the reason this page exists rather than just being a travel note.

Egyptian temples are frequently aligned to solar events, and Luxor's neighbour Karnak has a well-documented alignment to the mid-winter sunrise, first proposed by the astronomer Norman Lockyer in 1894 and refined by later researchers. Luxor Temple should, in theory, do the same. It does not, cleanly.

The temple's axis is not straight. Amenhotep III's original core points in one direction; Ramesses II's later additions, the court and pylon at the front, sit on a noticeably different azimuth. A 1937 survey by Alexandre Varille and Robert Schwaller de Lubicz first drew attention to the bend in detail, and more recent academic analysis has confirmed it is real and measurable, not a surveying error. What nobody has settled is why.

One paper on precessional effects in ancient astronomy, reviewing the case directly, concludes that it remains as yet unclear whether the bend can be tied to an astronomical shift at all, as opposed to a simpler explanation: the front of the temple needed to face the Nile and the direction processions arrived from, while the inner sanctuary kept an older alignment fixed by Amenhotep III's builders. Both readings are defensible. Neither is proven.

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