Staying within a similar vein, mythology – at https://phys.org/news/2025-10-unearth-ancient-egypt-karnak-temple.html … researchers have carried out a geoarchaeological survey of Egypt’s Karnak Temple near Luxor. What was once ancient Thebes. It is one of the world’s largest temple complexes and how it came about is intriguing. Once again we have a reference to ancient myth. Not in the Bible on this occasion but in ancient Egypt. How beliefs can shape not just the way people think but where they place their holy places.
The research revolves around changes in the bed of the Nile river. Today, Karnak lies 500m east of the Nile but analysis via 61 sediment cores from within and around the Temple site have led to mapping what the site was like in the ancient past. Or, during dynastic Egypt to be more precise. Prior to 2500BC the site was unsuitable for permanent settlement due to its being flooded on a regular basis by the Nile river. The earliest the site could have been occupied was in the Late Old Kingdom period – dynasty 5 by the look of the dates, 2591-2152 and the latter embracing dynasty 6 and the beginning of the First Intermediate Period. Ceramic fragments from archaeological contexts corroborate these dates. They go on to say the land on which Karnak was founded was formed when river channels cut into their beds, to the west and east of the site. Over subsequent centuries and millennia the river channels diverged even further – creating more space for the Temple to develop and expand. The eastern channel, in the Old Kingdom, was even more prpronounced than the ensuing western channel. It was the newly created island between those channels that we are concerned with.
Now, here is the interesting bit as the dates will not surprise your average Egyptologist. The authors of the study in the journal Antiquity say the landscape of the Temple, at this time, can be compared to Egypt’s ‘creation myth’ and this is why the site may have been chosen by the priesthood. The creator god of the Egyptians manifested on high ground emerging from a primordial lake of water. Further, MK texts [or myth] refer to the ‘primeval mound’ rising up from the Waters of Chaos. Hence, the emergence of an island in the midst of the Nile and its annual flooding event may have signalled to them an auspicious location.