The warrior pharaoh Ramses II built the Ramesseum temple in the 13th century BC. It is part of the Theban necropolis in Upper Egypt, near the modern city of Luxor. The temple is a funeral one.
At present, only a tiny part of this historical structure survives. However, archaeologists have not stopped excavating and are finding more and more facts that connect this temple with the history of Ancient Egypt. The temple lies in ruins, but it reveals a majestic structure even from these ruins. The architecture is identical to the construction of Medinet Habu, but the dimensions are much more significant.
Location of Ramesseum Temple
It stands on the West Bank of the Nile River, near the Deir el Bahari Valley temple. The Ramesseum exists in the centre of a residential area with a surrounding clay wall.
History of Ramesseum
Ramesses II modified, usurped, or constructed many buildings from the ground up, and the most splendid of these, per New Kingdom royal burial practices, would have been his memorial temple: a place of worship dedicated to the pharaoh, god on earth, where his memory would have been kept alive after his death. Surviving records indicate that work on the project began shortly after the start of his reign and continued for 20 years.
New Kingdom Architecture of Ramesseum
The design of Ramesses’s mortuary temple adheres to the standard canons of New Kingdom temple architecture. Oriented northwest and southeast, the temple itself comprised two stone pylons (gateways, some 60 m wide), one after the other, each leading into a courtyard. Beyond the second courtyard, at the centre of the complex, was a covered 48-column hypostyle hall surrounding the inner sanctuary. An enormous pylon stood before the first court, with the royal palace at the left and the king’s gigantic statue looming up at the back.
As was customary, the pylons and outer walls were decorated with scenes commemorating the pharaoh’s military victories and leaving a record of his dedication to and kinship with the gods. In Ramesses’s case, much importance is placed on the Battle of Kadesh (ca. 1274 BC); more intriguingly, however, one block atop the first pylon records his pillaging in the eighth year of his reign, a city called “Shalem”, which may or may not have been Jerusalem. The scenes of the great pharaoh and his army triumphing over the Hittite forces fleeing before Kadesh, as portrayed in the canons of the “epic poem of Pentaur”, can still be seen on the pylon.
Only fragments of the base and torso remain of the syenite statue of the enthroned pharaoh, 19 m (62 ft) high and weighing more than 1000 tons. This was allegedly transported 170 mi (270 km) over land. This is the world’s largest remaining colossal statue (except statues done in situ). However, fragments of four granite colossi of Ramesses were found in Tanis (northern Egypt), with an estimated height of 69 to 92 feet (21 to 28 meters). Like four of the six colossi of Amenhotep III (Colossi of Memnon), there are no longer complete remains, so the heights are based on unconfirmed estimates.
Remains of the second court include part of the internal façade of the tower and a portion of the Osiride portico on the right. War scenes and the Hittites’ rout at Kadesh are repeated on the walls. The upper registers show a feast honouring the phallic god Min, the god of fertility. On the opposite side of the court, the few Osiride pillars and columns still left furnish an idea of the original grandeur. Scattered remains of the two statues of the seated king, which once flanked the entrance to the temple, can also be seen, one in pink granite and the other in black granite. The head of one of these has been removed to the British Museum.
Thirty-nine of the forty-eight columns in the great hypostyle hall (41 x 31 m) still stand in the central rows. They are decorated with the usual scenes of the king before various gods. Part of the ceiling, decorated with gold stars on a blue ground, has also been preserved. The sons and daughters of Ramesses appear in the procession on the few walls left. The sanctuary comprised three consecutive rooms, with eight columns and the tetrastyle cell. Part of the first room, with the ceiling decorated with astral scenes, and a few remains of the second room are all left.
Temple of Tuya
Adjacent to the north of the hypostyle hall was a smaller temple dedicated to Ramesses’s mother, Tuya, and his beloved chief wife, Nefertari. To the south of the first courtyard stood the temple palace. The complex was surrounded by various storerooms, granaries, workshops, and other ancillary buildings, some built as late as Roman times.
Temple of Seti I
A temple of Seti I, of which nothing is now left but the foundations, once stood to the right of the hypostyle hall. It consisted of a peristyle court with two chapel shrines. The complex was surrounded by mudbrick walls, starting at the gigantic southeast pylon.
A cache of papyri and ostraca dating back to the Third Intermediate Period (11th to 8th centuries BC) indicates that the temple was also a significant scribal school site.
The site was in use before Ramesses had the first stone put in place. Beneath the hypostyle hall, modern archaeologists have found a shaft tomb from the Middle Kingdom, yielding a rich hoard of religious and funerary artefacts.
The Architecture of the Temple
The entire temple layout is very typical for the New Kingdom era. According to it, the courtyards are located directly behind the towers. The pillars here are in the form of papyrus; there is a hall for the sacred barque of the god and an inner sanctuary. Passing into the temple’s depths, one can notice that the floor is rising, and the ceiling, on the contrary, is falling. It was created to remind people of the times when the Egyptian universe was made from a primordial hill that rose from the endless waters of the flood.
Towers
The two towers at the entrance pylon are badly damaged. When you enter the northern tower, you can contemplate the scenes of the Egyptian camp and the battle scenes at the back of the building. On the southeast side of the First Court are the remains of the giant colossus of the pharaoh. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most massive stones ever created. All the remaining parts of this colossal granite statue are perfectly carved and polished. These parts represent the chest, upper arm and leg of this pharaoh. After taking all measurements, archaeologists assumed the statue was more than 17 meters high and weighed at least 10,000 tons. The Ancient Egyptian builders brought the colossus rock from Aswan‘s quarries.
Pylon and Courtyards
The Ramesseum Temple is oriented from the east to the west. It originates from the eastern side, with a high ruined tower. Further, behind this tower, there is an open courtyard. On the southern side of the wall were pillars against which the king’s statues, in the guise of the god Osiris, leaned. On the other side of the courtyard, a facade of the castle was a portico of two columns. The edifice, located in the second courtyard, served as the western wall of the yard. The second courtyard was significantly higher, in contrast to the first. One could get to the passage through a staircase. On both sides of the stairs were two gigantic statues of Ramses II, each 20 meters high.
Scenes
On the right side of the passage, you can see many scenes of the battle between Kadesh and Ramses in his chariot. This scene shows the enemy pierced by arrows or trampled under horses’ feet.
This temple’s first and second towers are decorated with powerful scenes of a significant battle. This scene describes the courage of Ramses II, who saved all Egyptians from the defeat of the Hittites. For sure, it would have been a shame for them.
There were pillars square in cross-section from the western and eastern parts, against which the statues of Osiris learned. Along with the northern and southern regions, there were entrances of a double row of even columns with capitals in the form of buds.
Undoubtedly, the Egyptians’ interest in art in this place passed into complete submission to architecture. The colossal statues here seem to be regular columns and not works of sculpture. Thus, they are inferior to architecture.
Colonnade and Sanctuary
Going through the second courtyard, you can see the arcade from all four sides and the terrace from the back. On each side of the central staircase are the monoliths of the pharaoh. In front of the courtyard entrance were even more statues of Pharaoh Ramses, supported by Osirid columns. The scenes on the pillars show the pharaoh offering gifts to the deities. The exit follows the sizeable hypostyle hall. Two rows of columns stand in the middle. These columns resemble an open papyrus flower and rise above the side aisles, where the columns are crowned with bud-shaped capitals. Behind the hypostyle hall, there exists a sanctuary, which consists of several rooms.
Castle of Ramses II in the Ramesseum Temple
The castle of Pharaoh Ramses exists in the northern part of the first courtyard. It contains a vestibule, a vast reception hall of 16 columns, the king’s chambers and a majestic throne room. There is a harem at the back of this palace. The outstanding feature of this complex is that it has a temple, a castle, living rooms, stables, warehouses and many different premises. All gather in one massive complex.
Excavation
The origins of modern Egyptology can be traced to the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt in the summer of 1798. While undeniably an invasion by an alien imperialist power, this was nonetheless an invasion of its times, informed by Enlightenment ideas: alongside Napoleon’s troops went men of science, the same whose toil under the desert sun would later yield the seminal 23-volume Description de l’Égypte. Two French engineers, Jean-Baptiste Prosper Jollois and Édouard de Villiers du Terrage, were assigned to study the Ramesseum site, and it was with much fanfare that they identified it with the “Tomb of Ozymandias” or “Palace of Memnon” of which Diodorus of Sicily had written in the 1st century BC.
The next visitor of note was Giovanni Belzoni, a showman and engineer of Italian origin and, latterly, an archaeologist and antiques dealer. Belzoni’s travels took him in 1815 to Cairo, where he sold Mehemet Ali a hydraulic engine of his invention. There, he met British Consul General Henry Salt, who hired his services to collect from the temple in Thebes the so-called ‘Younger Memnon’, one of two colossal granite heads depicting Ramesses II, and transport it to England. Thanks to Belzoni’s hydraulics and his skill as an engineer (Napoleon’s men had failed in the same endeavour a decade or so earlier), the 7-ton stone head arrived in London in 1818, where it was dubbed “The Younger Memnon” and some years later, given pride of place in the British Museum.
Against the backdrop of intense excitement surrounding the statue’s arrival and having heard wondrous tales of other, less transportable treasures still in the desert, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned his sonnet “Ozymandias”. In particular, one massive fallen statue at the Ramesseum is now inextricably linked with Shelley because of the cartouche on its shoulder bearing Ramesses’s throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re, the first part of which Diodorus transliterated into Greek as “Ozymandias”. While Shelley’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” owe more to poetic license than to archaeology, the “half sunk… shattered visage” lying on the sand accurately describes part of the wrecked statue. The hands and the feet lie nearby. Were it still standing, the Ozymandias colossus would tower 19 m (62 ft) above the ground, rivalling the Colossi of Memnon and the statues of Ramesses carved into the mountain at Abu Simbel.
A joint French-Egyptian team has been exploring and restoring the Ramesseum and its environs since 1991. Among their discoveries during excavations include kitchens, bakeries and supply rooms for the temple to the south and a school where boys were taught to be scribes to the southeast. Some challenges in preserving the area have been the control of modern Egyptian farmers using the area for farming and encroaching on the ruins.
Built by Ramses III was built as a funeral temple. Only a small part of the temple survives. Since Ramses III ruled for 67 years it is during his rule that architecture achieved new heights. Hence trying to explain every detail here is practically impossible. All I can suggest is; to experience the beauty and the marvel of the temple, one must come here. As the saying goes: ” Seeing is Believing!” Visit Soon!