Medinet Habu — temple
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay

Medinet Habu

  • Elevation83 m
  • 2 min read
  • 25.720° N 32.601° E

Interesting facts

  • The entire south wall carries a festival calendar of 1,470 lines of hieroglyphs, listing offerings for daily, monthly and yearly feasts.
  • Some of the temple's stone was reused from the destroyed mortuary temple of Tausret, the last ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty.
  • Ramesses III's text describes a sacred pool before the temple planted with trees and lotus; the outer court once held a pool about 20 by 18 metres.
  • A list of kings carved for the Festival of Min shows ancestral royal statues carried in procession, naming nine pharaohs in 16 cartouches.
  • Two lists on the front pylon name conquered places in oval shields, about 125 of them on the south tower, mostly in the Levant.
  • Long processions of royal sons were carved without names; later pharaohs added names and titles, and Ramesses VIII later reworked one figure for reasons still unclear.
  • In the outer court stand chapels of the God's Wives of Amun, priestesses of the eighth to sixth centuries BC, including Nitocris, daughter of Psamtik I.
  • A five-aisled basilica, the Holy Church of Djeme, once cut across the second court; its builders removed a column and hacked away Osiris pillars.
  • Coptic Djeme had an estimated population of almost 19,000 before it was abandoned in the ninth century.
  • Nineteenth-century clearances to prepare the temple for visitors destroyed much of the Coptic town, including the church, without any records being made.

Why it is worth it

Medinet Habu is the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, built on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor in the early twelfth century BC, and one of the best preserved temples of ancient Thebes. The whole precinct is enclosed by a mudbrick wall some 18 metres high and 10 metres thick, and you enter it not through a conventional pylon but through a fortified gatehouse modelled on a Syrian migdol — a military form chosen for a king who presented himself above all as a warrior.

Inside lies the reason the temple is famous: more than 7,000 square metres of carved walls. The walls carry the great record of the king's campaigns, including the battles of his eighth year against the "Sea Peoples" — ships locked together in a melee, warriors in feathered headdresses, ox-carts of migrating families. It is one of the few contemporary images of the upheavals that ended the Bronze Age world of the eastern Mediterranean. In the courts and colonnades beyond, the original paint survives on many reliefs and on decorated ceilings, so that parts of the temple still show the colours it was meant to be seen in.

The site holds more than one age. Against the great temple stand the remains of Ramesses' mudbrick palace, and inside the enclosure is an older, smaller temple of Amun begun under Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, who later had her name chiselled away. After the pharaohs, a town grew up within the walls — Djeme, a populous Coptic settlement with its own church — which lasted until the ninth century. Since 1924 the University of Chicago's Epigraphic Survey has worked almost continuously at Medinet Habu, copying every relief and inscription line by line.

Getting there

Medinet Habu stands at the southern end of the Theban necropolis on the west bank, about 4 km from the village of Aţ Ţārif. Luxor International Airport (LXR) is about 12 km away by straight line, across the river. From Luxor's east bank visitors cross the Nile by bridge or ferry and continue by taxi or hired car; the temple pairs naturally with the nearby tombs and other temples of the west bank.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Luxor 6The Most Beautiful Places in Egypt 35The Most Beautiful Temples in Egypt 7The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Egypt 18The Most Beautiful Temples 95The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

Medinet Habu is an archaeological locality situated near the foot of the Theban Hills on the West Bank of the River Nile opposite the modern city of Luxor, Egypt. Although other structures are located within the area and important discoveries have also been made at these sites, the location is today associated almost synonymously with the largest and best preserved site, the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III. It was an important New Kingdom period temple structure in the West Bank of Luxor in Egypt. Aside from its size and architectural and artistic importance, the mortuary temple is probably best known as the source of inscribed reliefs depicting the advent and defeat of the "sea peoples" during the reign of Ramesses III, including the Battle of the Delta. Some of the building materials were re-used from earlier monuments including the destroyed mortuary temple of Tausret the last known ruler and the final pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Greco-Roman period temple to Isis, Deir el-Shelwit, lies 4 kilometers to the south and re-used inscribed blocks from Medinet Habu were found there.

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25.72000, 32.60083per Wikidata