04/09/2024
Ramesses III built his funerary temple to record his victories on its walls, and to be a temple to Amun, the god of war Sekhmet and Osiris. Sekhmet was depicted as a woman carrying the head of a female lion to signify strength and ferocity. The Habu area had a special sanctity for the ancient Egyptians, as they believed that the eight gods of creation according to the Ashmunin doctrine had settled here in this area where the temple was built. This temple is called in ancient Egyptian "Hat Khnemet Heh", perhaps meaning "Temple of the One United with Eternity". This temple is located in the far south of a group of temples commemorating the pharaohs built on the edge of the desert near the cultivated lands in western Thebes. It seems that Ramesses III ordered its construction in an area that had a certain sanctity, as evidenced by the temples and buildings found there dating back to different eras, starting from the Middle Kingdom to the Coptic era. [1]
The most important temples in this area is the temple dating back to the Eighteenth Dynasty, which includes buildings dating back to the reign of King Amenhotep I. Additions to it continued, including buildings and inscriptions, until the Ptolemaic and Roman eras. It was started by Amenhotep I and completed by Thutmose I and II, and its construction and inscriptions were added to by Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. In front of this temple there was a shrine dating back to the Middle Kingdom. Also in this sacred area are the shrine tombs for the princesses of the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Dynasties, the most famous of which is Princess Amun-Ris, daughter of the Ethiopian King Kashta, as well as the great temple to immortalize the memory of King Ramses III with its various annexes