“Never Before had the Like Been Done”

The second half of Amenhotep III's reign was markedly different from the first. The days of mere earthly heroics were now irrelevant because the king had survived mortal combat with the forces of nature – with the very gods themselves. Triumph manifested itself in a grand building program the length of the Nile Valley, especially at its fulcrum, Thebes (Maps 4 and 5). Euphoria inspired this work, and divine justification fueled it.

Like many other pharaohs, Amenhotep III claimed that “never before had the like been done,” but in this king's case, it was true. On the east bank of Thebes, Luxor Temple blossomed from a small shrine into a magnificent edifice. A mile away, grand Karnak turned away from the river and began to stretch out along a new axis running parallel to it. Neighboring Mut Temple, the royal alma mater, gained beautiful statuary. Processional ways leading to and from the temples unrolled between rows of great ram-headed sphinxes with images of the king held firmly in their forelegs’ embrace. Across the river, the project at Kom el Hettan continued to unfold ever larger. In Lower and Middle Egypt, old shrines at sites such as Athribis, Bubastis, Heliopolis, and Hermopolis were augmented either architecturally or sculpturally or both. In Upper Egypt and the Sudan, sanctuaries were revised and redecorated, while new ones were conceived and built from scratch, complete with beautifully carved, enormous sculptures.