her projects at the site, Karnak's Red Chapel, or Chapelle Rouge, was intended as a barque shrine and originally, may have stood between her two obelisks. She later ordered the construction of two more obelisks to celebrate her sixteenth year as pharaoh; one of the obelisks broke during construction, and thus, a third was constructed to replace it. The broken obelisk was left at its quarrying site in Aswan, where it still remains. Known as The Unfinished Obelisk, it demonstrates how obelisks were quarried.
The last major change to Precinct of Amun-Re's layout was the addition of the first pylon and the massive enclosure walls that surround the whole Precinct, both constructed by Nectanebo I.
In 323 AD, Constantine the Great recognised the Christian religion, and in 356 Constantius II ordered the closing of pagan temples throughout the empire. Karnak was by this time mostly abandoned, and Christian churches were founded amongst the ruins, the most famous example of this is the reuse of the Festival Hall of Thutmose III's central hall, where painted decorations of saints and Coptic inscriptions can still be seen.
European knowledge of Karnak
Thebes' exact placement was unknown in medieval Europe, though both Herodotus and Strabo give the exact location of Thebes and how long up the Nile one must travel to reach it. Maps of Egypt, based on the 2nd century Claudius Ptolemaeus' mammoth work Geographia, have been circling in Europe since the late 14th century, all of them showing Thebes' (Diospolis) location. Despite this, several European authors of the fifteenth and 16th century who visited only Lower Egypt and published their travel accounts, such as Joos van Ghistele or André Thévet, put Thebes in or close to Memphis.
The Karnak temple complex is first described by an unknown Venetian in 1589, although his account relates no name for the complex. This account, housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze,
