Hundred-Gated Thebes: “The Like Had Never Been Made”

Thanks to the countless captives and heaps of gold Amenhotep III hauled back from his Nubian campaign, Karnak Temple received a grand new gateway facing the Nile (Figures 14 and 15). Part of the text carved on a stela from his mortuary temple acknowledges the source of the structure's construction funds: “His Majesty brought the gold for it out of the country of Karoy on the first campaign of victory of massacring the wretched Kush.” This new gateway, called a “pylon” in Egyptian architecture, has two wide wings with broad bases and walls slanting inward to narrower tops. Between them, an enormous bivalve, richly decorated cedar door once swung on bronze hinges pinned into granite sockets.

Amenhotep himself described the pylon on a stela in his memorial temple and now in the Cairo museum:

Drill holes for securing the silver flooring sheets are still visible on the passageway. Its original finished height is unknown since its top has obviously broken away, but it must have been huge because it was said to have had eight flagpoles, each 130 feet tall, their pennants waving only slightly above the walls, according to near-contemporary representations.