The modern town of Akhmim is today well known in Egypt as a source for fine textiles. In antiquity, however, it was home to the god Min and as a town was called Ipu. On our way back to Luxor , we stop at Akhmim to see the remains of the New Kingdom temple to Min that was found in the 1980s. A colossal statue of Ramesses II's daughter Meretamun stands in a large pit right in the center of town. Her position marks the site of a mud brick pylon gateway with a limestone gateway running through it. Statues of Ramesses II accompanied that of Meretamun who was wife to her father during part of his reign.

All the group - from left, Sarah, Emily, Betsy, Katie, Sharon, Adam, and Jeremy -- are looking at pieces of a colossal statue of a late Eighteenth Dynasty ruler, either Tutankhamun or Ay, reused by Ramesses II in the Min temple. Elements of altars showing the Aten are also at this site, which must have been functioning during the Amarna era.

Our last stop before arriving back in Luxor was at the temple to Hathor in Dendera, This beautiful late Ptolemaic and Roman period structure replaced several buildings of earlier times, but it preserves the remarkable "Hathoric" columns, with the face of the goddess made into capitals.

Further inside the temple Sarah and Emily both look at the side room called "the wabet", "the pure place", where the statue of the goddess rested before being carried to the roof by means of the nearby staircase. The end of our great Eid vacation and back to Mut!