Senusret I

The second king of the Twelfth Dynasty and the son of its founder, Amenemhat I. He ruled about forty-five years, consolidated the reunified state his predecessors had assembled, pushed Egyptian control deep into Nubia behind a line of fortresses, and built or rebuilt temples the length of the country.

His is the earliest substantial building at Karnak of which anything survives to be walked around, and it survives by accident. He built a small limestone barque (a ceremonial boat carrying a sacred image) shrine — the chapel a portable divine boat was set down in during a procession — and a later king took it apart and used the blocks as rubble fill inside a pylon (a monumental gateway formed by two massive towers). The fill preserved them. Reassembled in the twentieth century, the chapel is now one of the most precisely cut and best-preserved Middle Kingdom monuments in Egypt, and the oldest thing at Karnak a visitor can see whole.

The reign is the settled middle of the Middle Kingdom. Nubia was taken and held as far as the Second Cataract, with a chain of mud-brick fortresses built to control the river; expeditions went to the Sinai and the eastern desert quarries; and the great temple sites were rebuilt in stone, including Heliopolis, where one of a pair of his red granite obelisks is still standing on its original spot — the oldest standing obelisk in Egypt.

This is also the period in which Egyptian literature takes the shape later scribes treated as classical. Two of the best-known compositions are set in his reign: the Tale of Sinuhe, an official’s account of flight and return, and the Instruction of Amenemhat, in which his murdered father addresses him. Both are literature written for and about the court, not archive documents, and they are read as such.

A limestone barque shrine at Karnak — the White Chapel — dismantled by a later king and buried as fill inside the Third Pylon, recovered and reassembled in the twentieth century. He also built a temple to Amun at Karnak of which very little remains in place, and set up statues and a court in the older, eastern heart of the precinct.

The Open Air Museum, on the north side of the Karnak precinct — a walled yard of reassembled buildings that most visitors walk past. The White Chapel stands there: a square kiosk of pale limestone on a plinth, open on all sides, with sixteen pillars carved in a shallow, exact relief that is a different quality of cutting from anything in the New Kingdom parts of the temple. Walk around the outside of the plinth and read the pillars: the carving is why people come.