Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1984 - 53

were all brought to trial. Those found guilty were allowedto die
"by their own hand," but the fate of the prince who would be
king and his ambitious mother is not recorded.
Many years before the Harem Conspiracy, in the eighth
year of his reign, Rameses III had fought one of the greatest
battles in Egyptian history; and it is with scenes from this
battle that many of the walls of Medinet Habu are decorated.
It was fought against a confederacy of peoples from the
north- now known as the "Sea Peoples"- who intended to
settle in Egypt and began to move on her by land and sea.
Rameses countered their advance overland on the border of
Palestine, and met their fleet in the Nile Delta where, in the
first great naval battle in history, he defeated them and forced
them to scatter across the Mediterranean.
Egypt won the battle against the Sea Peoples. But she
was the loser eventually, for one of the members of the confederacy, the Philistines, who settled on the coast of ancient
Palestine, denied Egypt access to the iron ore found in Asia
Minor. The rest of the world moved on into the Iron Age,
but Egypt was left behind, her days as a world power at an
end. Meanwhile, Medinet Habu Ifemple had been enclosed by
massively thick walls, over 60 feet (18 meters) high and built
of mudbrick. Storehouses, offices, workshops and officialliving
quarters were built inside so that for the next few hundred
years Medinet Habu was the administrative and economic
center of the whole region around.
The

Temple

Palace

Medinet

Hábu

Habu, on the eastern bank of the Nile directly
opposite Luxor, was originally the site of a temple
Medinetbuilt between 1503 and 1450 B.c. and dedicated to the
god Amun. (This temple can be seen on the right of Frith 's
photograph.) Over 250 years later, Rameses III (1198-1166
b.c. ), the last of the great kings of Egypt, chose to build his
mortuary temple which he named "United-with-Eternity" on
the same site.
Frith's picture shows the great entrance gateway to the
Rameses temple which was once approached by a canal, longsince disappeared, that led from the Nile, and perhaps by an
avenue flanked by statues of the lion-headed goddess of war,
Sekhmet, two of which can be seen, broken, in the foreground
of Frith's picture. Another stands intact just discernible to
the right of the entrance gateway.
The highly original gateway, known as the Royal Pavilion,
consists of two tall, crenellated, stone towers connected at the
western end (i.e., the end farthest away from the camera in
Frith's picture) by a lofty chamber at first story height only;
the space beneath formed the entrance gateway. The ground
floor rooms in the Pavilion were guard rooms; those on the
upper two stories were royal apartments.
The exterior walls of the Pavilion are sculptured with warlike scenes of Rameses' campaigns in Syria showing him slaying
his enemies or leading them captive before Amun. High up
on the walls on either side of the inner gateway are brackets
decorated with stone heads depicting the king's enemies. Originally, these brackets may have supported statues of Rameses
who would thus be shown trampling the heads of his, and
therefore Egypt's, enemies underfoot. The interior walls of the
royal apartments could not be in greater contrast. They are
decorated with scenes of harem life in which Rameses is surrounded by beautiful women, and several times is shown relaxing in a chair; chucking the concubine standing before him
under her chin- a scene of unprecedented intimacy by Egyptian
standards.
It is ironic to think that Rameses probably died as a
result of a conspiracy among his harem women, led by one of
his lesser queens who plotted to kill him so that her son might
inherit the throne. Having persuaded several concubines and
royal servants to help her, she first tried to murder the king
by magical means, using wax dolls.When this proved ineffectual, the conspirators sent messages to their relations outside
the palace to raise a rebellion. The rebellion failed and they

Portico

of The Temple
oi Dendera
Ptolemaic temple at Dendera, which was begun by
Ptolemy IX (116-80 b.c.), was dedicated to the goddess
The Hathor whom the Greeks identified with Aphrodite.
The twenty-four columned portico, seen in Frith's photograph,
was added on to the original nucleus of the temple by the
Roman Emperor Tiberius (a.D. 14-37), according to an
inscription on its cornice. The six columns that make up the
facade of the portico are linked by low "curtains" or screenwalls, only the tops of which can be seen on the right of Frith's
picture, decorated with a frieze of cobras. The capitals of the
columns are four-sided and carved with representations of the
face of Hathor; note that the ears are not human but those of
a cow: in one of her manifestations, Hathor was a cow-goddess.
The columns themselves are about 50 feet (15 meters)
high with a circumference of some 35 feet (10 meters). Some
fifteen years before Frith photographed Dendera, Jean-Jacques
Ampère ( 1800-1864), the French historian who traveled in the
Near East, had written that these columns were still "brilliant
with colours that time had had no power to deface." The faces
of Hathor, however,had long since been defaced by the zealous
vandalism of Early Christians who used part of the Ifemple
precinct as a church. The sand and rubble that had gradually
filtered into the temple over the centuries was cleared away
shortly after Frith's visit. Tbday the Ifemple of Hathor at
Dendera with its magnificent portico is one of the most
resplendent of Egyptian monuments.
1984 53
November/December

Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1984

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - November/December 1984