Entrance - Luxor Temple, Egypt
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Karnak and Luxor In ancient times, religious processions moved between the Karnak Temple complex and Luxor Temple along a 2.5-kilometer-long paved Avenue of Sphinxes. The causeway was lined with a thousand larger-than-life-size ram-headed sphinxes backed by gardens and pools. Six bark shrines, similar to those now in Karnak’s Open-Air Museum, were built at intervals along its length, structures in which priests carrying the statue of Amen from the one temple to the other could pause for rest and ceremonies. The northernmost of these shrines lay just outside the Bab al-Amara at Karnak; the southernmost lay in the First Court of Luxor Temple. Early in the New Kingdom, before the Avenue of Sphinxes was built, a water-filled canal apparently ran here and sacred barks sailed on it between Karnak and Luxor. By the later New Kingdom, however, as lunar-dated festivals progressed through the calendar and began to fall outside the season of the annual flood, there was too little water to float the barks and the canal was filled in and paved over. Henceforth, processions moved overland or on the Nile. - The Illustrated Guide to Luxor, by Kent R.Weeks

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