Abydos: Funerary Chapel & Temple of King Ramses II

Here's part two of my tour of the Abydos project's excavation site. I know significantly less about these monuments, so it will just be a few pictures and very brief explanations.

This is a mudbrick funerary chapel. The best explanation I can come up with is it's sort of like gravestones, but without the tombs. There were no people buried here, but rather monuments to specific dead people. None of the monuments are here -- they were all stolen -- so it's just a bunch of constructed holes in the ground.

As more and more important people started to have bigger and bigger monuments erected in their memory, eventually King Ramses II came along and trumped all their little mudbrick structures with his elaborate stone temple, right next door.

This is an engraved stone column from the temple. You might be able to see some of the gold detail still on the column, near the 2 triangular engravings, indicating that it was once painted.

Some heiroglyphics, which I believe spell out the name of King Ramses II, engraved in the stone. The animal figure in the center is a baboon. Here are some details of the heiroglyphics:



And here's a panoramic view of the entire site, with the mudbrick funerary chapel on the left and the stone temple on the right. Click to view the image in closer detail.