Photo by Galen C. Dalrymple, copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
The Temple of Karnak is arguably the most famous of the ancient temples in Egypt. There’s good cause: construction began around 1950 years BC and continued through the time of the Ptolemies. In 1979 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The original name of the temple was Ipet-isut, meaning “The Most Select of Places”. The complex’s modern name “Karnak” comes from the nearby village of el-Karnak, which means “fortified village”.
The complex is a vast open site and includes the Karnak Open Air Museum. It is believed to be the second most visited historical site in Egypt; only the Giza pyramid complex near Cairo receives more visits. It consists of four main parts, of which only the largest is currently open to the public.
The Great Hypostyle Hall in the Precinct of Amun-Re has an area of 50,000 sq feet with 134 massive columns arranged in 16 rows. One hundred and twenty-two of these columns are 33 feet tall, and the other 12 are 69 feet tall with a diameter of over 9.8 feet. The architraves that stretch across the tops of these columns (like the one pictured above), are estimated to weigh 70 tons.
These architraves may have been lifted to these heights using levers. This would have been a time-consuming process and also would have required great balance to get them to such heights. A common alternative theory regarding how they were moved is that large ramps were constructed of sand, mud, brick or stone and that the stones were then towed up the ramps. If stone had been used for the ramps, they would have been able to use much less material. If it was sand that filled up to the top of the columns, that sand would have to be removed eventually once the architraves were in place. The top of the ramps presumably would have employed either wooden tracks or cobblestones for towing the megaliths. (Much of the above information is from Wikipedia.)
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler ordered all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.
Joseph Goebbels had made the persecution, and ultimately the extermination, of Jews a personal priority from the earliest days of the war, often recording in his diary such statements as: “They are no longer people but beasts,” and “[T]he Jews… are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews.”
But Goebbels was not the first to suggest this particular form of isolation. “The yellow star may make some Catholics shudder,” wrote a French newspaper at the time. “It renews the most strictly Catholic tradition.” Intermittently, throughout the history of the papal states, that territory in central Italy controlled by the pope, Jews were often confined to ghettoes and forced to wear either yellow hats or yellow stars. – The History Channel
TRIVIA FOR TODAY: In 1962, a laughter epidemic broke out in Tanzania. The outbreak began in a girls’ school and spread to other communities, ultimately affecting 1,000 people and causing the temporary closure of 14 schools.
Twolfgcd's Blog (Galen Dalrymple) 