The mortuary temple of Ramesses III — the best-preserved painted colour of any large temple in Egypt, and almost always empty.
Medinet Habu is the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, at the southern end of the Luxor west bank. It is enormous, it is remarkably intact, and on most mornings you will share it with almost nobody.
Regular visitors to Egypt tend to name it as their favourite site in Luxor.
Colour. This is the single best place in Egypt to see what a temple actually looked like. Whole ceilings and column capitals keep their original paint — deep blues, reds, greens and yellows — because the temple was buried and sheltered rather than exposed. After a week of bare sandstone it is genuinely startling.
Depth of carving. The reliefs at Medinet Habu are cut extraordinarily deep into the stone, partly so they could not easily be erased and recarved. The effect in raking morning light is dramatic.
And the reliefs record something specific: Ramesses III's wars against the Sea Peoples, including a naval battle. They are one of the primary sources for a migration and collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. You are looking at contemporary reporting on a historical crisis.
Ramesses III reigned in the 12th century BC and is often described as the last great pharaoh of the New Kingdom. His temple was modelled in part on the Ramesseum of Ramesses II nearby.
The complex is fortified, entered through a gatehouse built in the style of a Syrian fortress — an unusual thing for an Egyptian temple and a sign of the period's insecurity.
The fortification turned out to matter. In the troubled decades at the end of the New Kingdom the walled enclosure became the administrative centre of the whole west bank — grain stores, offices, the workmen's payroll — and the population moved inside its walls for safety. A temple ended its working life as a walled town.
Ramesses III's own death is part of the record too: the trial documents of the harem conspiracy describe a plot against him from inside the palace, and a modern CT study of his mummy found evidence of a cut throat. Palace intrigue, documented on papyrus and, three thousand years later, in a scanner.
Later it became the centre of the town of Djeme, and Coptic settlement filled and covered much of the site, which is part of why so much survived. Records from the workers' village of Deir el-Medina, close by, include accounts of the first recorded labour strike in history during Ramesses III's reign.
Morning, for light on the deep reliefs and cooler walking
Opening hours: Daytime hours with seasonal variation.
Opening hours and ticket prices may change. Please confirm the latest details before visiting.
The village of the men who cut and painted the royal tombs — the most completely documented community to survive from the ancient world.
The southern valley of the Theban necropolis, where queens and royal children were buried — and where the finest painted tomb in Egypt is cut into the rock.
A sunrise flight over the west bank — temples, tombs, sugar cane fields and the Nile, from a few hundred metres up.
Two enormous seated statues standing in a field — all that is easily visible of what was once the largest temple in Egypt.
Three colonnaded terraces cut into a cliff wall at Deir el-Bahari — the mortuary temple of the woman who ruled Egypt as king.
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