visitor center of Medinet Madi in Fayoum مدينه ماضي بالفيوم

visitor center of Medinet Madi in fayoum مدينه ماضي بالفيوم

visitor center of Medinet Madi in Fayoum

Medinet Madi History 

 The history of Medinet Madi (“the city of the past”) started in the Middle Kingdom, in the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C., when an agricultural project in the Fayoum region saw the foundation of a town called Dja and the construction of a temple by Amenemaht III and Amenemaht IV, which was dedicated to the cobra goddess Renenutet and the crocodile god “Sobek of Shedet”, patron of the entire region and its capital Shedet, “Horus who resides in Shedet”. The small temple was built following a very simple, but extremely original architectural design: a court and a portico with two columns, an atrium and a sanctuary with three niches. The scenes on the western side of the temple are named after Amenemhat III; those on the eastern side after Amenemhat IV, his son and successor. 

On the eastern wall of the atrium the king is portrayed performing the ritual “tightening of the rope” to found the temple, whereas on the western wall the gods Sobek and Anubis ritually purify the Pharaoh. 

During the Ptolemaic period, when Fayoum experienced a new agricultural redemption, the town of Dja – then called Narmouthis - a Greek name meaning “the city of (Isis)-Renenutet-Hermouthis”- and its old temple, which was “rediscovered” beneath a blanket of sand, were restored and consolidated, a high temenos was built and more monuments were erected north and south of the Middle Kingdom temple. 

 In Ptolemaic and Roman times, in his beloved Fayum Amenemhat III was worshipped as a god with the name of Porramanres or Pramarres or Premarres, phonetical transcriptions of the Egyptian name Per-aa Nymaatre, i.e. Pharaoh Nymaatre. The fundamental role of Narmouthis in developing and strengthening Amenemaht III’s cult is explicitly confirmed by Hymn 4, the last of the hymns composed by the Hellenized Egyptian Isidorus in the 1st century BC. The four hymns were inscribed on two piers of the entrance to the vestibule of Heracleodorus in the Ptolemaic temple of Medinet Madi.

مدينه ماضي بالفيوم