The Ramesseum Tours & Tickets

The Ramesseum is the most famous ruin in Egypt that almost nobody visits. It sits on the Luxor west bank between the Colossi of Memnon and the Valley of the Kings, on the road every tour bus takes, and the buses do not stop. Most mornings you can walk the whole site nearly alone, which is a strange thing to say about the temple that gave the English language one of its most quoted poems.

Ramesses II built it as his mortuary temple, the place where his cult would be maintained after death, and he built it on the scale he built everything. What is left is a ruin, and the ruin is the point. The Nile flood undermined the foundations over centuries and the great structures came down. You are looking at collapse, and collapse is precisely what makes this site land.

Ozymandias

In the courtyard lies the wreck of what was once the largest free-standing statue in Egypt: a seated colossus of Ramesses in granite, broken into pieces, the head and torso separated, the face turned up at the sky. Estimates put its weight around a thousand tonnes.

In 1816 Giovanni Belzoni removed a different, smaller head of Ramesses from this site and shipped it to England, where it entered the British Museum as the Younger Memnon. The news reached Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had never been to Egypt, and in 1818 he published a sonnet about a shattered colossus in the desert bearing an inscription boasting of works that no longer exist. The traveller's tale in the poem is loose with the facts and exact about the feeling. "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair" is the line everyone remembers, and the joke Shelley built into it is that there is nothing left to look at.

Standing next to the actual stone gives the poem a second life. The face is not ruined. It is calm, and rather beautiful, and lying on its side in the dirt.

What else is here

Enough survives to read the plan. Two pylons, badly damaged but carrying reliefs of the Battle of Kadesh, the engagement against the Hittites that Ramesses spent his reign advertising as a great victory and which was closer to a draw. The account here is one of several he had carved across Egypt, and comparing the versions is how historians caught the spin.

Part of the hypostyle hall still stands, and the surviving columns give a sense of the height. Behind and around the temple run mudbrick storerooms, long vaulted magazines that held grain, oil, wine and temple equipment. They are the best-preserved structures on the site, which tells you something about mudbrick vaulting: the granite came down, and the mud is still standing.

There is also a smaller temple of Ramesses's mother Tuya, and the remains of a palace on the south side of the first court, where the king would have stayed when he came to take part in festivals.

Why it is so ruined when Medinet Habu is not

The comparison is instructive and visitors ask it constantly. Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III a short drive away, stands almost intact. The Ramesseum, built earlier and bigger, is rubble.

The difference is water. The Ramesseum sits closer to the floodplain, and centuries of annual inundation worked at the foundations until the heavy stonework failed. Medinet Habu sits higher and drier. Egyptian stone buildings are extraordinarily durable in the desert and vulnerable at the edge of the river, and the two temples are the cleanest illustration of that anywhere in Luxor.

How to fit it in

The Ramesseum takes forty-five minutes and it is on the way. A standard west bank morning runs Valley of the Kings, then Hatshepsut, then the Colossi of Memnon as a photo stop, and the Ramesseum sits inside that triangle. Adding it costs you one short stop and it is the quietest thing you will do all morning.

Go late in the morning if you can, after the tombs. The site faces the rising sun and the light on the fallen colossus is better once it is high.

If you are choosing between the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu and can only do one, take Medinet Habu for the standing architecture and painted ceilings. Take the Ramesseum if you would rather be alone with a broken statue and a poem.