Dynastic History|Luxor Temple — The Statues Under the Sun Court Floor

On the morning of 22 January 1989, while the Luxor antiquities inspectorate under Mohammed el-Saghir was cleaning and levelling the peristyle court of Amenhotep III, the work hit stone about a metre down, beneath a covering layer of small stones. Five statues came out first. By the end of the season there were twenty-six.

The list reads like an inventory of the New Kingdom court: Thutmose III as a sphinx in alabaster; Amenhotep III standing in red quartzite; Tutankhamun as a sphinx; Horemheb kneeling with offering jars; the goddess Iunyt in grey granite; Taweret in sandstone; two granite serpents of Amun-Re-Kamutef. Several had been damaged before they were buried.

Statues like these were not decoration. Each put a named king permanently in the god's house, receiving offerings after death, and each was a claim on the temple's revenues and its priests' attention. Burying them was an administrative decision — the building had run out of room for its own past — and the excavators dated the pit to the temple's later reuse, when the precinct stood inside a Roman army camp and much of the court was floored over.

The court, with its double rows of papyrus-bundle columns, is on the visitor route through the temple. Most of the statues are a few hundred metres north in the Luxor Museum, which has displayed them since.

📸 Cover: the court of Amenhotep III at dusk, above the pit — Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons