The Temple of Karnak
"The Temple of Karnak" is a chapter within *Turrets, Towers, and Temples: The Great Buildings of the World as Seen and Described by Famous Writers* (1898), an anthology compiled and edited by Esther Singleton. The chapter's text is drawn from Amelia B. Edwards's celebrated travelogue *A Thousand Miles Up the Nile* (1877), which recounts Edwards's journey through Egypt in 1873–74. Singleton selected this passage as the volume's representative treatment of ancient Egyptian sacred architecture. The piece opens by confronting the inadequacy of language itself. Edwards insists that no verbal description can transmit a true image of Karnak's Great Hypostyle Hall to anyone who has not stood inside it, because the structure has no parallel in the world—not St. Peter's, not Notre-Dame, not the Colosseum—against which to measure it. The hall covers an area, she notes, roughly four times that of Notre-Dame de Paris, yet sheer acreage fails to account for the experience the place produces in the visitor. Edwards then turns to the physical fabric of the hall. The great central nave is flanked by rows of columns of staggering girth and height, and the roofless lateral aisles expose their walls to the sky, those walls being covered from top to bottom with colossal bas-reliefs. Each carved figure stands eighteen to twenty feet high, depicted in acts of ritual worship before the gods of Thebes—Amun, Mut, Khonsu—rendered half in deep shadow and half in Egyptian sunlight, their coloring bleached away by millennia yet their forms knife-sharp against the stone. The effect Edwards records is less that of looking at decorative carving than of walking among a population of giants frozen mid-gesture. She addresses the question of the clerestory windows that once lit the central avenue, dismissing scholarly conjecture that they were glazed, and arguing instead that solid stone gratings would have filtered the desert light. Whether open to full sky or filtered through gratings, the illumination of the hall strikes her as the architects' deliberate choice: such columns, she says, should have nothing between them and "the infinite blue depths of heaven." The chapter reaches its rhetorical climax in a sentence Edwards presents as nearly a commonplace of travel literature, so often has it been written, yet one she finds she must repeat: that the Great Hall at Karnak is "the noblest architectural work ever designed and executed by human hands." The Pyramids may be more stupendous in mass; the Colosseum covers more ground; but neither rivals the Hypostyle Hall in what Edwards calls "nobility of conception" and "majesty of the highest order." The passage closes not with statistics but with the sensation of smallness and awe that overtakes the traveler who enters, the hall transforming its visitor's sense of scale so completely that the human body becomes, momentarily, negligible. Singleton's framing in the anthology places the Karnak chapter among treatments of St. Mark's in Venice, the Tower of London, the Kremlin, and York Minster, positioning an ancient Egyptian temple as an equal participant in a global survey of humankind's greatest built achievements. The editorial choice implicitly argues that the Hypostyle Hall belongs not only to Egyptological study but to the universal canon of architectural experience.
By Esther Singleton · First published 1865 · Genre: Travel Writing/Travel Memoir, Archaeological Writing, Descriptive Non-fiction