Madinat Habu 
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Destinations
THE West bank          
Time to visit
WINTER  6 AM – 5 PM  ،  SUMMER  6 AM – 5 PM 
Cameras Allowed
ALLOWED OUTSIDE LOCATION AND SOMETIMES INSIDE UPON PERMISSION. 
Cost Of Ticket
THE COST OF THE TICKET ARE  IN Egyptian pound OR  IN DOLLAR PRICE DEPENDS ON LOCATION AND ACCORDING TO GROUP NUMBERS. 
Madinat Habu is one of Egypt’s best preserved and most interesting temples. Unfortunately, most tourists arrive here at the end of a long morning of sightseeing and rarely get more than a quick peek at this fascinating monument. The temple deserves better. It is one of the few monuments in Egypt to convey the emotional impact that religious art and architecture must have had for the ancient Egyptians. The site of Madinat Habu lies at the southern end of the Theban Necropolis and is surrounded by a thick wall, 210 x 315 meters (682 x 1024 feet) that defines a 66,150 square meters (698,000 square feet) enclosure. Its name is Arabic and means “The City of Habu,” perhaps a reference to the great Dynasty 18 architect, Amenhetep, son of Hapu, whose memorial temple lies 300 meters (1,000 feet) to the north. Another suggestion is that it derived from the word
hebu, the ancient name for the ibis, symbol of the god Thoth, who has a Ptolemaic Period temple a few hundred meters to the south. In earlier times, the site was called Djeme, after a nearby town. Djeme may come from a word meaning “troops” or “young men,”  and a play on that word, tchau-muwe, meaning “fathers and mothers,” was the name of a temple predating the Dynasty 18 monument in Madinat Habu’s forecourt.
 
The Madinat Habu enclosure is home to several monuments, but by far the best known and most studied is the memorial temple of Rameses III. It is also one of the best-preserved temples in Egypt. It was known in ancient Egypt as the Mansion of Millions of Years of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt UserMa’at-Ra-Mery-Amen in the Estate of Amen on the West of Thebes.

The temple of Rameses III is one of the few temples in Egypt to be completely excavated and published. Since 1924, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago has worked here, excavating and mapping the site from1924 to 1937 and recording its scenes and inscriptions from 1924 onward. Because large parts of its ceiling have been preserved, its justly famous decoration was protected from wind and rain and still displays much of its original paint, giving visitors a taste of what the temple originally looked like, with bright, vividly colored—even gaudy—scenes of religious ceremonies and historical events. Two gates pierced the Habu enclosure walls. On the west side, at the rear of the temple, a stone gate that is now blocked was used by temple employees, delivery men, and minor officials. The gate on the east side was  the grand processional entrance, and it is the one used by tourists today. In antiquity, two canals met before the gate: one ran west from the Nile, another south along the edge of the cultivation from the temple of Sety I. They joined in a T-shaped harbor beside a great stone quay. It was here that ceremonial barks made their final stop on the West Bank during the Beautiful Festival of the   Valley, bringing priests and members of the royal family and divine statues in procession for ceremonies before sailing to Luxor Temple on the East Bank. The quay and canal today lie beneath a modern   asphalt road. Traces of stone buildings that once lined the canal can be seen in a nineteenth century watercolor by David Roberts, but they have since vanished beneath the rapidly-expanding modern village of Kawm Lulah and a cluster of small coffee shops and backpacker hotels. From the quay west to the temple enclosure, a stone pathway leads to a doorway called the Syrian Gate, modeled after a migdol, a western Asiatic fortification. It is also called the High Gate.

From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.aa
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