Medinet Habu: the temple everyone skips, with the paint still on

Almost every Luxor day trip drives past it. The coaches go to the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut and the Colossi, and Medinet Habu — the best-preserved temple on the west bank, with a great deal of its original paint still on the walls — is left to the people who asked for it specifically. That is a strange state of affairs, and it is worth exploiting.

What it is

Medinet Habu is the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, the last pharaoh to rule a genuinely powerful Egypt, built in the early twelfth century BC. It is enormous — the enclosure runs to several hectares — and it was never only a temple. Inside the walls there was a palace, storerooms, workshops, administrative offices and housing. It was the working headquarters of the west bank.

The first thing you meet is the strangest. The gatehouse, the migdol, is built in the form of a Syrian fortress, complete with towers and defensive-looking windows. Egypt had no such building tradition; Ramesses III copied it from the fortified gates his armies had seen in the Levant, and put it on the front of a religious building as a statement. It is architectural swagger, and it is the earliest thing of its kind in Egypt.

The migdol gatehouse at Medinet Habu, modelled on a Syrian fortress

Why the colour survived here and nowhere else

This is the reason to come, and the reason is accidental.

Egyptian temples were painted — all of them, in strong flat colour, floor to ceiling. What you see at Karnak and Luxor is bare stone because two and a half thousand years of weather, sunlight and hands have taken the paint off. At Medinet Habu, much of it is still there: blues and reds and yellows in the ceiling of the second court, on the column drums, in the protected corners of the sanctuary.

It survived because the site was buried and then lived in. After the New Kingdom collapsed the enclosure became a fortified town, and in the Christian period it was the Coptic settlement of Djeme, with houses built into and against the temple walls. Rubbish, silt and mudbrick piled up around the columns, and the pigment underneath was kept out of the sun for the best part of two thousand years. The archaeologists who cleared it in the 1920s and 30s were uncovering colour that had not been weathered since antiquity.

Stand under the ceiling in the second court and look up. That is what every temple in Egypt looked like, and this is very nearly the only place you can see it.