t high, with lotus
capitals, support a massive architrave, while beyond them are double
columns on three sides of a great court. This temple of Luxor was
originally built by Amenophis III of the eighteenth dynasty in honor of
Ammon, the greatest of Egyptian gods, his wife and their son, the
moon-god Khons. The successor of this monarch erased the name of Ammon
and made other changes, but Seti I restored Ammon's name, and then came
Rameses II, the builder who never wearied in rearing huge temples and in
carving colossal figures of himself.

Rameses added a colonnaded court in front of the temple, built an
enormous pylon, with obelisks and colossal statues that celebrate his
own greatness, and erased the cartouches of the original builder,
substituting his own and thus claiming credit for the erection of the
whole temple. Were the spirit of the great Rameses allowed to return to
earth and reanimate the mummy that now forms the most interesting
exhibit in the Cairo Museum, how great would be his humiliation to know
that his ingenious devices to appropriate the credit of other men's work
have been exposed? In nearly all the remains of Upper Egypt, Rameses
figures as the sole builder, but the cunning of modern archaeologists
has stripped him of this credit and has revealed him as the greatest of
royal charlatans.

The general plan of the Luxor temple is repeated at Karnak and all other
places in Egypt. The pylon, two towers of massive masonry, formed the
entrance to the temple, the door being in the middle. The towers of the
pylon resemble truncated pyramids and, as they were formed of large
stones, they frequently survived when all other parts of the temple fell
into ruins. The surfaces of the pylon afforded space for reliefs and
inscriptions, telling of the glories of the king who reared the temple.
In most cases obelisks and colossal statues of the royal builder were
placed in front of the pylon. From the pylon one enters the great open
court, with covered colonnades at right and left. This court was the
gathering place of the people on all big festivals, and in the center
stood the great altar. Back of this court, on a terrace a few feet
higher, was the vestibule of the temple upheld by columns, the front row
of which was balustraded. Behind this was the great hypostyle hall,
extending the whole width of the building, with five aisles, the two
outer ones being lower than the others. The roof of the central aisle is
uph