Dynastic History|The Cachette Court, Karnak — Where the Temple Put Its Statues Away

Georges Legrain began clearing the court north of Karnak's seventh pylon in October 1901, on instructions from Gaston Maspero, who ran the Service des Antiquités. On 26 December 1903 the workmen reached a large stela of Seti I lying on a bed of clean sand. Under the sand were statues, and under those, more.

Four seasons of digging to 1907 followed a pit that ran fifteen or sixteen metres down and filled with groundwater as fast as it was emptied. The Egyptian workmen who went into it brought up roughly seven hundred stone statues and fragments and some seventeen thousand bronzes, along with stelae, altars, sceptres and votive cubits — dedications made to Amun over centuries by kings and by officials buying a permanent place in the god's house.

No text records who dug the pit or when. The objects are the only evidence, and they suggest a temple clearing accumulated gifts without destroying them. Most went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; others were distributed to provincial museums, private hands and institutions abroad.

The court is now crossed by anyone walking from the hypostyle hall toward the seventh pylon. The finds are catalogued in a database built by the Institut français d'archéologie orientale with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities under an agreement of April 2008, online since November 2009 and carrying photographs since January 2012. Legrain's own field diary for 26 December 1903 to 3 April 1904 surfaced in Paris in 2014 and went to the Louvre.

📸 Cover: the block statue of Senenmut and Neferure (CG 42114), recovered from this court and now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo — Ismoon, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons