Our next stop was Karnak...we jumped on another "microbus" and were there in 5 minutes. The Karnak Temple Complex is a huge site that houses the ruins of temples, chapels, pylons, and other buildings. Karnak today is a vast, open-air museum, and the largest ancient religious site in the world. It is also the second-most visited tourist site in Egypt. The Giza Pyramids are first.
The characteristics of Karnak are not unique to other ancient Egyptian architecture, but the size and number of features is quite vast. One notable aspect is the Hypostyle Hall, which is a 50,000 square-foot area with 134 gigantic columns arranged in 16 rows. One hundred twenty-two of these columns stands 10 meters tall, and the other 12 are 21 meters tall with a diameter more than three meters. The architraves on top of these columns have been estimated to weigh approximately 70 tons! It was an amazing site that was also amazingly hot, so we spent about an hour and decided to move along to the next adventure...
The characteristics of Karnak are not unique to other ancient Egyptian architecture, but the size and number of features is quite vast. One notable aspect is the Hypostyle Hall, which is a 50,000 square-foot area with 134 gigantic columns arranged in 16 rows. One hundred twenty-two of these columns stands 10 meters tall, and the other 12 are 21 meters tall with a diameter more than three meters. The architraves on top of these columns have been estimated to weigh approximately 70 tons! It was an amazing site that was also amazingly hot, so we spent about an hour and decided to move along to the next adventure...
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