Ramesseum

Listen first. On most mornings the loudest sound here is the wind moving across dry ground, and perhaps a bird calling from the green fields to the east. Under your feet the earth is pale and dusty, mixed with crumbs of ancient mud brick. Ahead, sandstone columns stand in rows, warm in colour, worn smooth at the edges. Beyond them, the bare cliffs of the Theban hills rise in a long wall of rock. This is the Ramesseum, the memorial temple of Ramesses the Second.

Ramesses the Second ruled Egypt in the thirteenth century before Christ. His reign lasted more than sixty years, one of the longest in Egyptian history. He built on a huge scale across the country. On this western bank of the Nile, opposite modern Luxor, kings built temples for their own cult. Priests would make offerings to the king here, during his life and long after his death. His actual tomb lies hidden in the Valley of the Kings, behind the hills.

That separation matters. The tomb was secret and sealed. The temple was public and grand, a place of ritual close to the farmland. Many kings built such temples along this edge of the desert. Most have almost disappeared. The Ramesseum survives in part, enough to show its plan. You can still follow the line of the great gateways, the open courts, and the halls of columns that led towards the sanctuary at the back.

The village of Deir el-Medina lies a short distance away, in a fold of the hills. The people there were skilled craftsmen. They cut and painted the royal tombs for generations. Some of them would have known this temple well. The temple was also an economic centre. It owned land and stored grain. It gave food and rations to workers. A temple in ancient Egypt was a religious building, but it was also a kind of state bank.

You can see that second role in the long mud-brick buildings around the stone core. Look at the low, curved roofs. These are vaulted storerooms, built from sun-dried brick, and some of their arches still stand. Here is a surprise many visitors miss. These humble storerooms are among the best surviving examples of ancient Egyptian brick vaulting. The stone temple held the gods. The brick buildings held the grain, the wine, and the oil that kept the temple running.

Now find the fallen giant. In the first court lie the broken pieces of a colossal seated statue of the king, carved from a single block of granite. Scholars estimate its original weight at around a thousand tonnes. It was among the largest free-standing statues ever made in Egypt. Today it lies in huge fragments. Walk around them slowly. You can pick out a massive foot, part of the chest, and an upper arm. The scale is hard to understand until you stand beside it.

How did it fall? No one knows for certain. Many scholars think an earthquake brought it down in ancient times. Others point to people who later broke stone from the site. Either way, the colossus has lain here for a very long time. Greek travellers saw it in ruin more than two thousand years ago. The historian Diodorus of Sicily described a great statue of a king he called Ozymandias. That name comes from a Greek form of one of Ramesses' royal names.

That Greek account travelled far. In 1818 the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley published a sonnet called Ozymandias. It describes a shattered statue in the desert, with a boast carved on its base. Two vast legs of stone stand alone, and the sands stretch away. The poem is about the pride of rulers and the patience of time. Shelley never came to Egypt. Yet many readers connect his lines with this temple and this broken king.

The temple's modern name is more recent than you might expect. In the nineteenth century the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, who helped decipher hieroglyphs, called it the Rameseion. The name stuck and became the Ramesseum. In the same century, a large granite bust of the king was taken from this site. The Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni moved it in 1816. Today that head sits in the British Museum in London, far from the courtyard where it once stood.

Now look at the stone gateways. The walls carry scenes of war. The most famous is the Battle of Kadesh, fought against the Hittites, a powerful kingdom in what is now Turkey and Syria. Ramesses presented the battle as a great personal victory. In the carvings he rides his chariot alone among enemy soldiers. Historians read the result more carefully. The battle probably ended without a clear winner. Years later the two empires signed a peace treaty, one of the earliest known in history.

Move further in, towards the halls of columns. In the second court, look for tall figures of the king carved against the pillars. He stands with arms crossed over his chest, in the pose of Osiris, god of the dead and of rebirth. Some faces are badly damaged. Others still hold calm, wide features. Deeper inside, in a smaller hall, part of the ceiling carries astronomical images. These show stars, decans, and gods of the night sky, used to measure time.

The site keeps one more quiet secret. Beneath the later storerooms, excavators in the nineteenth century found an older tomb shaft from a much earlier period. Inside was a box of papyri, now called the Ramesseum Papyri. They include medical texts, magical spells, and literature. Archaeologists also found many flakes of stone and pottery with writing practice on them. These suggest that young scribes may have studied here. Picture them copying signs in ink while the priests worked nearby.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment between the columns. Notice how the light changes on the sandstone as the sun moves. Look at the fallen granite and the brick vaults behind it. Then look east towards the fields and the river, where people still farm the same land. Ramesses wanted this place to last forever. Much of it did not. But you are standing in it now... and that is its own kind of survival.