Karnak: 1858

Very lovely photo.

Over the last 150 years they've really dug those columns out! If you match up the chips/marks in the some of them, you can see that almost half of the current height was underground in 1858. Cool.

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~ancient/lux_tem3.jpg

There are five books, each has about 100 photographs, so I'll be done in a few years. I will start looking for "Shorpy worthy" photos tomorrow.

well, get scanning, friend! (i know how time consuming to get the parameters you would want, so that's somewhat a tongue-in-cheek remark :)

I have multiple albums of photographs from the late 1870's of a trip taken to Egypt and the surrounding areas, never have been scanned, I ought to do so, some of the pictures are amazing. All are large photographs....

1858!? Holy cow, this could just as easily have been taken in 1958! I wonder just how many pre-civil war photographs actually exist. There couldn't possibly have been very many cameras in existence at the time.

[At the very least, many thousands of photographs from the era survive as daguerreotypes, prints and glass negatives. Photography had been around for a quarter of a century in 1858. - Dave]

Large negative images of Egypt are the best -- you can feel the texture of the stone.

The picture is not of Karnak - it's the Colonnade in Luxor Temple, with the mosque of Abu el Haggag in the background - but otherwise it's a wonderful picture.

wow. really fantastic! way to document! what's so fascinating is the dress of the people. reminds me of that old silent movie Grass. really great image.