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Through the walls of the Hypostyle Hall is the mostly ruined Transverse Hall, alongside a reconstructed Third Pylon of Amenhotep III. Though much ruined, in antiquity it was quite splendid and parts of it were even plated in gold by pharaoh Amenhotep III. A vestibule was added late in the pharaoh's reign and then partly decorated with incompleted triumph scenes by Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten before the new pharaoh abandoned the project due to his religious revolution which rejected the cult of the god Amun-Re.
In building the Third Pylon, Amenhotep dismantled a number of older monuments, including a small gateway he himself built earlier in the reign. He deposited hundreds of blocks from these monuments inside the pylon towers as fill. These were recovered by Egyptologists in the early 20th Century and led to the reconstruction of several lost monuments including the White Chapel of Senwseret I and the red chapel of Queen Hatshepsut which are now in the open air museum at Karnak.
The reliefs on the pylon were later restored by Tutankhamen who also inserted images of himself. These were, in turn, later erased by Horemheb. The erased images of Tutankhamen were long thought to be of Akhenaten himself, supposedly evidence of a coregency between Akhenaten and Amenhotep III which most scholars now reject. |
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