Dynastic History|Karnak Open-Air Museum — The Chapel That Came Out of a Pylon

In 1927 Henri Chevrier's workmen began pulling limestone out of the rubble core of the Third Pylon at Karnak. The pylon was Amenhotep III's, and like most Egyptian pylons it was packed with masonry from buildings the court no longer had a use for. Among the fill were the pieces of a small barque station cut for Senusret I of the Twelfth Dynasty, nearly six hundred years before the pylon rose.

Reassembled, the chapel is a low platform reached by a ramp, its roof carried on six pairs of pillars. The reliefs show the king embraced by Amun, Horus, Min and Ptah — the standard grammar by which a reign claimed the gods' endorsement. The more useful text runs along the base of the outer walls: the nomes of Upper Egypt on one side, of Lower Egypt on the other, each with its emblem. That is administrative geography, the provinces the treasury counted on, set out in stone.

How long the extraction took is not agreed. The Karnak project's record of the monument has blocks coming out between 1927 and 1934 and the chapel going back up in 1937–38; other accounts compress the removal to 1927–1930. Where the chapel originally stood is unknown, so the building visitors meet is a modern arrangement of ancient stone.

It stands in the open-air museum at the north-west corner of the precinct, a few metres from the reassembled Red Chapel of Hatshepsut. The pylon that destroyed it is also the reason it survives.

📸 Cover: the reassembled White Chapel in the Karnak open-air museum, Marianne Michel, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons