You might be saying, “Oh no, not more pictures of reliefs!” Well, yes, but I couldn’t help it. I have said before that the walls and pillars and ceilings etc. were all painted during the heyday of the Egyptians. We saw perhaps the best of this at Karnak. When you stop to consider how long the paint has lasted on these reliefs, that’s quite impressive by itself.

The first photo was taken (I think) at the Great Festival Hall of Tuthmosis III inside Karnak. This hall was quite impressive and had some of the best painting that we saw.

The second photo was taken in a small temple but I’m not sure which one. There is one other thing that I want to point out about this picture, in addition to the color. If you look at the second photo, you can see some scratched out areas of the relief. You might have noticed something similar on many of my earlier relief pictures. Originally, I suspected that these were just damage from various sorts over several thousand years. But that is not the case. If you look at the photo, you can see that the damage is very careful and specific. It was done on purpose. In this second photo, a couple of the gods are anointing a pharaoh. Many other things are also shown in the scene. At some point after this wall was carved, someone came along who didn’t like the pharaoh, or his religion, or his race, or something. These later parties had the pharaoh carved out of the scene, but they didn’t dare carve out or destroy the gods. So the damage here is very specific as to what represented the pharaoh and what represented the gods.

The third photo is at the Great Festival Hall of Tuthmosis III. Many of the halls, temples, and tombs had the ceiling painted blue and stars painted all over the ceiling. You can see this on the roof of this hall where the sky is blue and the stars are black five-sided stars. Our guide also said that the pillars in this hall are supposed to represent tent poles as Tuthmosis III spent much of his life living in canvas tents on military expeditions. Our guide also told us that pretty much all women say that these poles look phallic and not like tent poles. I remain neutral on this issue.