Dynastic History | Medinet Habu — The Temple That Became the Town When the System Ended

Ramesses III built his memorial temple here between about 1187 and 1156 BCE, and had it walled. The eastern entrance is a pair of high towers modelled on the Syrian migdol fortresses Egyptian armies had met in the field, and the enclosure they close still stands largely intact.

It was never only a cult building. Medinet Habu served as the administrative centre for the workmen's village at Deir el-Medina, which means the paperwork of the royal tombs passed through this enclosure: the ration lists, the absence registers, the complaints. It was also where western Thebes went when the countryside was unsafe. In the disorder at the end of the New Kingdom the community that cut the royal tombs left its village and took shelter inside these walls, and the arrangement that had housed and rationed a hereditary workforce for centuries came to an end, at around 1070 BCE, with the Twentieth Dynasty.

The walls kept being useful long after the state that raised them. In the first millennium CE a Coptic town called Djeme grew up inside the enclosure, built against and over the older stonework. It is gone from the precinct now, cleared to expose the temple, so the reliefs a visitor reads today spent centuries as somebody's neighbourhood wall.

The site is open and ticketed, and quieter than most on the west bank. The migdol gate is the first thing through the entrance.

📸 Cover: The first pylon of the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons