Medinet Habu Tours & Tickets

If you want to know what an Egyptian temple actually looked like, Medinet Habu is the answer, and it is quiet. The mortuary temple of Ramesses III sits at the southern end of the Luxor west bank, past the turning most coach parties take, and while the Valley of the Kings absorbs the morning crowds this place stays comparatively empty. It is the best-preserved mortuary temple in Egypt and it keeps more of its original colour than anywhere else on the west bank.

Ramesses III built it in the twelfth century BC, modelling it closely on the Ramesseum of his more famous predecessor. Where the Ramesseum collapsed, this survived, because it stands on higher and drier ground away from the reach of the flood. The walls are up, several roofs are on, and in the upper chambers and along the shaded colonnades the paint is not a trace. It is paint.

Carved deep enough to keep

Look closely at the reliefs and you will notice they are cut unusually deep, in some places several centimetres into the stone. That was deliberate. Egyptian kings routinely erased their predecessors by chiselling out cartouches and recarving their own, and Ramesses III had the whole temple carved so deep that removing his name would have meant removing the wall.

It worked. It also gives the reliefs their particular look, with hard black shadows in the cut lines that make the figures read from a distance even in flat light.

The Sea Peoples

The northern exterior wall carries the most important historical record on the site and one of the most important anywhere in Egypt: the campaign reliefs against the Sea Peoples, a coalition of seaborne raiders who destabilised the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century BC and helped bring the Bronze Age world to an end.

The scenes show a naval battle in the Nile Delta, ships grappling, prisoners bound, and long inscriptions recording the outcome from the Egyptian side. Much of what historians know about the Sea Peoples comes from this wall, which is a reminder that our picture of a civilisation-ending crisis rests largely on the victory monument of one of the participants.

Nearby, and harder to look at, are the scenes of scribes counting severed hands and other body parts taken from the dead to tally the enemy losses. They are matter of fact and completely without drama, which is what makes them land.

The Migdol gate

You enter through something that does not look Egyptian: a tall fortified gatehouse modelled on a Syrian migdol fortress, with small windows high up. Ramesses III had spent his reign fighting in the Levant, and he built his temple entrance to look like the architecture he had been fighting against.

The upper rooms of the gate were a private royal retreat, and the reliefs inside them are domestic rather than martial, showing the king with women of the household. It is a very unusual survival and a strange note to find above a fortress gate.

The town that lived here

The enclosure was not just a temple. In the Coptic period a substantial town called Djeme grew up inside the walls, with houses built against the columns and a church in the second court. The town was cleared by excavators in the twentieth century, but the traces are visible once you know to look, and the soot on some ceilings is domestic rather than ancient.

This is the ordinary fate of Egyptian temples and Medinet Habu shows the sequence more clearly than most: royal monument, then quarry, then village, then archaeological site.

How to fit it in

Medinet Habu takes an hour to an hour and a half and it is the natural last stop on a west bank morning, after the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut. By then the light is high and hard everywhere else, which suits a site whose best material is in shaded colonnades and interior rooms.

It is also the west bank site most worth revisiting. On a first pass people photograph the migdol and the first court and leave. The colour is further in, in the second court and the rooms behind it.

Is Medinet Habu worth visiting?

It is the single most underrated major site in Luxor. If you have seen Karnak and the tombs and are wondering whether a fourth temple is one too many, this is the one that will surprise you, because it answers a question the others cannot: not how big were these buildings, but what did they look like.

If you are choosing between Medinet Habu and the Ramesseum, take Medinet Habu for the standing architecture and the paint. Take the Ramesseum only if you want the fallen colossus and the solitude.