A survey of the Thebaïc monuments begins, most naturally, with the ruins of Karnak. Here lay the great imperial temple of a hundred doors, which was dedicated to Ammon-Ra, the king of the gods, and the particular god of the place, which after him was called the city of Ammon (No-Amon, Diospolis). Ap, and with the feminine article Tap, out of which the Greeks made Thebes, was an isolated temple of Ammon, and is sometimes hieroglyphically used in the singular, or still oftener in the plural (Napu) as the name of the city; from whence the Greeks, naturally, without changing the article, made use of Θῆβαι in the plural. The whole history of the Egyptian kingdom is connected with this temple, since the elevation of the city of Ammon into a metropolis of the kingdom. Every dynasty contended for the glory of having assisted in extending, beautifying, and restoring this national sanctuary. It was founded under the first Thebaïc Imperial dynasty, the twelfth with Manetho, by its first king, the mighty Sesurtesen I., in the fourth century of the third millenium, B.C., and even now shows some fragments of the time and name of that king. During the succeeding dynasties, who sighed for several centuries under the oppression of their victorious hereditary enemies, the sanctuary doubtless stood unheeded, and nothing remains of what belongs to that period. But after Amosis, the first king of the seventeenth dynasty, had succeeded in his revolt against the Hyksos, about B.C. 1700, his two successors, Amenophis I. and Tuthmosis I., built round the remains of the most ancient sanctuary a stately temple with many chambers round the cella, and with a broad court and the propylæa belonging to it, before which Tuthmosis I. erected two obelisks. Two other pylones, with adjoining walls, were built by the same king, in a right angle with the temple, towards Luqsor. Tuthmosis III. and his sister enlarged this temple behind by a hall resting on fifty-six pillars, beside many other chambers which surrounded it on three sides, and were inclosed by a general outer wall. The next king partly did more toward the completion of the temple in front, and partly erected new independent temples in the vicinity, also built two other great pylones in a south-westerly direction before those of Tuthmosis I., so that from this side four high pylones formed the stately entrance to the principal temple.