With shifting landscapes, it can be hard to know why certain ancient temples were built where they are.

Benjamin Pennington, school of geography and environmental science at the University of Southampton, takes a closer look at the history of one.

Dr Benjamin Pennington is a Visiting Fellow in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton, as well as a secondary school Geography teacher.His research focusses on reconstructing ancient landscapes in order to answer targeted archaeological questions, usually by drilling sedimentary boreholes and analysing the deposits that are retrieved. Most of his work has focussed on Egypt, and to a lesser extent Iraq, China and other areas in the Mediterranean.

One of the ancient world’s largest temple complexes stands at Karnak, in Luxor in Egypt. Used for some three thousand years and dedicated to the state deity, Amun-Ra, today it is a UNESCO World Heritage site a few hundred metres from the Nile, welcoming millions of tourists every year.Despite over 150 years of archaeological investigation, the exact date of its foundation, its original landscape setting, and why it was located where it is, have all been open to debate.Our team has been working at the site for several years to answer these questions. We drilled 61 sediment cores in and around the temple complex, analysed the layers of mud and sand that came up, and studied tens of thousands of small pieces of ceramic that were also contained in the cores.We found the temple complex could not have been founded before about two-and-a-half-thousand BC due to regular flooding from the Nile, and our best indications are that it was initially begun in the Egyptian Old Kingdom, in the latter half of the third millennium BC.We also found that the temple was initially built upon a particularly high island, surrounded by Nile channels. This is surprising because today the Nile is some distance westward and there is also no river channel on the far side of the temple.But most intriguingly, our new understanding of the landscape around Karnak has striking parallels with an ancient Egyptian creation myth found in Old Kingdom texts, which features a creator god manifesting as high ground emerging out of ‘the lake’. We argue that it is possible that this location – the only known example of such elevated land emerging from water in this area at the time – was chosen for its similarities to this scene, which it would have recreated each year as the annual Nile flood receded.

Read More:[Southampton] - Research unearths origins of Ancient Egypt’s Karnak Temple

[Cambridge University Press] - Conceptual origins and geomorphic evolution of the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak (Luxor, Egypt)

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Benjamin Pennington, University of Southampton - The Earliest Origins of Karnak Temple in Egypt

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Benjamin Pennington, University of Southampton - The Earliest Origins of Karnak Temple in Egypt