Medamud temple, north of Luxor

Great trip to Medamud, it is on the Qena road north of Karnak. My driver did miss the turn but checked at the this the next checkpoint and we went back so fairly easy. Ibrahim Soliman had arranged the visit for us and the inspector was waiting for us but once he saw all our papers and booklets he left us to it. My fellow student was busy identify the old kingdom and middle kingdom layout underneath the Graeco Roman current temple whilst I was looking at decoration.

These are all the links etc I managed to find on the site
http://www.jstor.org/pss/25152711 this is a paper about Rat Tawy another manifestation of Hathor, the returning eye of Re

http://alain.guilleux.free.fr/medamoud/temple_montou_medamoud.php a site in French that is full of useful stuff

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/medamud.htm

and here are some references
Porter and Moss Book V 137-150
Seaton-Williams Ptolemaic Temples 28-29
Werner The God Montu. This one is particularly good as he mentions what the temple was like at all time periods up until the New Kingdom, starting from the early temple (i.e. Kemp's pre formal). As well as having loads about the God Montu

There was an avenue of sphinxes that lead to a large gateway. this avenue apparently would have gone all the way to Karnak

The site is very similar to that at Tod temple and I have no idea why it is closed. I am going to ask Mansour Boraik about it because I think it could be open in exactly the same way with tickets being sold at Luxor temple.



There is a peristyle courtyard leading to the remains of the hypostyle hall with some nice capitals both open and closed flower capitals. Further on is the sanctuary then a back part which was on top of the middle kingdon area and has a temple to Montu as a bull



This was a coloum from the peristyle court and it was about 1.5 meters high and had Rekhyt birds all around it. Having heard the lecture by Ken Griffin I am now noticing these where ever I go.



This was an interesting image that the Rekhyt were worshiping, the king shown as young child complete with forelock of youth and sucking his thumb sitting on a lotus bud, reminded me of Tutankamun's head emerging from the lotus.


Here are the cartouches, can anyone identify them for me?



This image is one of Montu, there are various falcon headed gods but you can spot Montu as he has a sundisk AND double feathers.



There was a fairly informal block yard, not on mastabas but arrange in rows. This piece is a winged sun disk with protective snakes either side, you can just see a bit of colour. Sorry my camera is awful, I only have a camera phone at the moment but I was with someone with a good camera and as soon as I get his photos I will put them up.



More images from the block yard.




This image was tricky to get as the entrance gateway has been walled up with a rough modern wall, I guess to protect it.



A nice offering bearer



One of the things I liked was as we were resting under the trees a local family came out of their house next to the temple and crossed it taking a short cut to their destination. I do like to see the locals amongst the monuments, they belong to them and it shows the timelessness of Egypt which is part of the attraction for me.