Ramesside Buildings Dynasties 19 and 20

The Ramesseum is the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II The Ramesseum is the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II. It is located in the Theban necropolis in Upper Egypt, across the River Nile from the modern city of Luxor. The name – or at least its French form, Rhamesséion – was coined by Jean-François Champollion, who visited the ruins of the site in 1829 and first identified the hieroglyphs making up Ramesses's names and titles on the walls. It was originally called the 'House of millions of years of Usermaatra-setepenra that unites with Thebes-the-city in the domain of Amon'. Unlike the massive stone temples that Ramesses ordered carved from the face of the Nubian mountains at Abu Simbel, the inexorable passage of three millennia was not kind to his 'temple of a million years' at Thebes. This was mostly due to its location on the very edge of the Nile floodplain, with the annual inundation gradually undermining the foundations of this temple, and its neighbours.

Dedication to the gods by Ramesses