Dynastic History | The Ramesseum — Where the Tomb Crews Took Their Complaint

Ramesses II called this building the House of Millions of Years of Usermaatre-setepenre That Unites With Thebes-the-City. Work began soon after his accession and ran for about twenty years in the thirteenth century BCE. What stands above ground now is a colonnaded hall, a scatter of papyrus columns, and the shattered syenite colossus of the seated king long associated with Shelley's "Ozymandias" — but the part that mattered administratively is the mud brick behind the stone.

Storerooms wrapped the temple on three sides. The oldest group are granaries roughly thirty-two metres long, roofed with mud-brick barrel vaults, described as the oldest such vault still standing in Egypt. A memorial temple in New Kingdom Thebes was an endowed estate as much as a place of cult, with land, staff, herds and grain in store.

That is why this building turns up in a labour dispute a century later. When the crews of Deir el-Medina stopped work in year 29 of Ramesses III, around 1157 BCE, and their first sit-down produced only part of what they were owed, the record of the stoppages names the temple of Usermaatre-setepenre as one of the places they went next, along with the temple of Baenre-meryamun, which was Merneptah's. The papyrus does not explain the choice. These were the great endowed estates of the west bank, and their storerooms held grain.

A joint French and Egyptian mission has worked on the temple and its mud-brick outbuildings since 1991. The site is ticketed and usually quiet; most visitors come for the fallen colossus and turn back before the vaults.

📸 Cover: The Ramesseum seen across the Theban west bank — area view, Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons