Position 49 - The Moslem Mosque In The Court Of Ramses Ii, At Luxor Temple, Thebes

Now we are down again! Do you see the top of the pylon tower, on which we have just stood? It is there on the right of the obelisk, which we so often mentioned as being then behind us. That tower has lost its cornice except at the left end; its fellow, the other tower on the left, is better preserved. Such a pair of towers, called by the Greeks a pylon, usually formed the entrance of an Egyptian temple, the great portal being in the middle between the two towers.

Part of the interior is hollow, with a staircase leading to the top. The walls are built with an inward incline as you see. Together the two towers form the front of the court and the façade of the temple. Notice that row of holes made by the later dwellers in this court long after it had ceased to be used as a sanctuary, that they might insert the ends of the timbers, supporting the roof of their house, of which the tower formed one wall.

The other walls of the house were built of brick, sun-dried, and therefore friable. The result we have already noted at Denderah (Position 46). As the centuries passed and house after house fell to ruins out there in Ramses's ancient court, it gradually filled with rubbish and crumbled brick, until the houses of to-day, like yonder mosque, stand upon an accumulation thirty feet deep, reaching almost to the capitals of the columns.

How incongruous it appears with its not ungraceful little tower, where the muezzin calls five times every day to the worship of Allah, in the court of the now forgotten Amon! And all the efforts of the archaeologists have not yet succeeded in dislodging these obstinate Moslems. But I am not sure that it would add to the picturesqueness of the whole if this Moslem shrine were banished. Who knows, however, what treasures for the archaeologist the rubbish under it may conceal! It covers the columns on that side of the court, corresponding to those which we see here on the left side. Among these, do you discern one quite small column with a fluted top? That belongs to the chapel of Thutmosis III, which Ramses II destroyed and appropriated, in order to build his court.

On the right are the superb columns of Amenophis III's unfinished hall, and you can now see the lower courses of the side wall, with which his successors closed it in. All about us and under our feet is the rubbish of fallen houses, in which the ancestors of these natives before us lived but a generation or two ago.

We now have the river on our left and Karnak before us nearly two miles beyond that pylon (Map 8), but we shall in our next view of this temple, stand at a point on our left as we now face, and, turning about, with the river on our right, look directly across our present line of vision, into the court of Amenophis III. On our Plan 10 we find this next position, and our field of vision is defined by the red lines numbered 50, which start from a point in the left-hand margin, directly above our standpoint 49.