A Certificate of Completion
At the end of this course you will be able to download a personalised certificate of completion from the classroom. A great way to keep track of your learning and celebrate your Egyptological journey.
A Tale of Two Temples: The Ramesseum & Medinet Habu With Lucia Gahlin
6x Monday Evenings 2nd june - 7th July 2025
Times: 7.30-9pm (UK Times) to join live.
We love to see you for the live lectures, but if you have to miss one, don't worry, you can of course catch up (or watch again) at your leisure via the recordings. You will have access to the recorded lectures for a whole month after the last live lecture. Recordings will be available until 7th August 2025.
In this 6 week course we shine the spotlight on two impressive temples situated on the west bank of Luxor. Built to honour and immortalise two different pharaohs, both called Ramesses, each of these temples are impressive and interesting in their own right and capture key events of the reign of the pharaohs they were built for. In addition to our exploration of these impressive buildings, we shall, however, discover that there is much more to these sites than the memory of these kings. Use of both the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu is far more complex than at first would seem, with multiple periods of activity, intriguing and important discoveries, additional temples and evidence for further ritual and domestic use.
The Ramesseum is home to colossal fallen statuary, inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’. A magnificent sandstone memorial temple for the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramesses II (c1279 – 1213 BC), surrounded by various buildings in mudbrick. In this course we will explore all the features of this temple complex, as well as the use of this site as a cemetery well before and after the 13th Century BC.
The 20th Dynasty pharaoh Ramesses III (c1184 – 1153 BC) also built an impressive memorial temple on Luxor’s west bank, at a site today known as Medinet Habu. Here Ramesses III commemorated his triumphs over the Libyans and the ‘Sea Peoples’ (the only recorded sea battle in pharaonic Egyptian history is on the temple wall here). We will explore the art, architecture and inscriptions of this ancient monument, but we will also consider other important structures on this site, including Ramesses III’s palace, Hatshepsut and Thutmose III’s temple to the god Amun, and the chapels dedicated to the influential God’s Wives of Amun.
Over this set of 6 lectures Lucia Gahlin will tell the story of these two significant places.
Lecture 1: Ramesseum: pre-use and re-use of a 19th Dynasty site
Lecture 2: Ramesseum: Ramesses II’s ‘Mansion of Millions of Years’
Lecture 3: Ramesseum: a place of plunder, archaeology and inspiration
Lecture 4: Medinet Habu: cult place of Amun
Lecture 5: Medinet Habu: the ‘Mansion of Millions of Years’ of Ramesses III
Lecture 6: Medinet Habu: secure and sacred precinct, home to palace, houses, chapels, and tombs
Lucia Gahlin
Lucia Gahlin
Lucia Gahlin is an Egyptologist based in the UK, she has been leading archaeological tours to Egypt for 30 years. Her most recent academic position was Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, where she continues to work closely with one of the world’s most important collections of Egyptian antiquities, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology.
She has worked extensively on the material dating to Akhenaten’s reign in the Petrie Museum and at the archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna, the remains of the pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital city in Middle Egypt, where she has been the Small Finds Registrar. She has been Chair of the Friends of the Petrie Museum, a Trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society, and Director of Bloomsbury Summer School. She has taught Egyptology for the Universities of London (Birkbeck College and UCL), Reading, Surrey, Sussex, Exeter, Warwick and Bristol. She has also taught many successful courses for Kemet Klub both in person and online. Her publications include Egypt: gods, myths and religion.
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