Medamud Archaeological Site

Medamud Archaeological Site

Location: 8 km Northeast from Luxor, Luxor Governorate Map

 

Medamud Archaeological Site is an ancient Egyptian settlement situated 8 km Northeast from Luxor in Luxor Governorate in Egypt. Medamud was excavated in 1925 and several religious buildings were indentified including that of the temple dedicated to the god of war Monthu.

 

Significance and function of the place in antiquity

The ancient Egyptian site of Madu (M3dw) has been documented as the site of the Month Temple since the end of the Old Kingdom or the 1st Intermediate Period. The place name has been preserved to this day via Coptic. Apparently the place had no other function. The local temple is one of the oldest archaeologically proven temples in Egypt.

Revered deities
The local temple was dedicated to the triad of gods of Madu, these were the war god Month, who in the late period was usually depicted in the shape of a bull, his companion Rat-taui (“Council of the Two Lands”), a female sun goddess, and her son Hor-pa-Re-pa -chered (“Horus-Re, the child”). Before the introduction of Amun as the main god in the Theban Gau, Month was the main god of this Gau. In the Theban area, the Month temples in Karnak and at-Tod are still dedicated to this god.

In Ptolemaic (Greek) times, the wind and fertility god Amun was worshiped here to the same extent, although his worship in this temple began in the New Kingdom.

 

Building history

The first simple temple was located in the east below the current temple. It dates to the end of the Old Kingdom or the First Intermediate Period, but before the 11th Dynasty. From the north, two pylons lying one behind the other led to a double cave sanctuary, the underground chambers of which were marked on the surface with mounds of earth. These mounds certainly had the function of ancient mounds. With the rise in groundwater levels since the construction of the Aswan Dam around 1970, this early temple was lost.

Sesostris III. (12th Dynasty, Middle Kingdom) had his own temple built over this first temple. The approximately 60 × 100 m large, north-south oriented temple was built from mud bricks. Only the doorways and columns, including the architraves, were made of limestone. The entrance to the temple was in the north. Two gates were reconstructed from the fragments found. The Sedfest portal, commemorating the coronation anniversary of Sesostris III. is now located on the ground floor in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, the second in the open-air museum in the Temple of Karnak.

In the 13th Dynasty the temple was expanded and further decorated, especially under Sobekhotep II. In the New Kingdom, Thutmose III. to build his own 21 × 32 m temple to the west of the Middle Kingdom temple. It was oriented in a west-east direction and consisted of a pillared hall, sacrificial table hall and barge sanctuary. The temple complex was already, strictly speaking, a double temple at this time.

In the Greco-Roman period, the temple was demolished, replaced by a new building and greatly expanded. Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (around 180–116 BC) had a pronaos added to the west of the temple, of which five columns including an architrave still stand upright today. The Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius (86–161) had the temple expanded to include another western courtyard with a double row of columns - the temple was now around 75 m long and 42 m wide. Emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus (42 BC – 37 AD) had a gate built for the surrounding wall at the end of the Alley of Sphinxes.

To the west of the temple there is an approximately 200 m long avenue of sphinxes that led to the quay.

At the end of the 4th century, a Coptic church was built on the temple site.

 

Research history

The temple was researched between 1925 and 1932 by the French Egyptologists Fernand Bisson de la Roque, Alexandre Varille and Clément Robichon on behalf of the Paris Musée de Louvre. Some of the finds are now exhibited in the Louvre and the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon.