Mentuhotep II

At Deir el-Bahari, Mentuhotep II’s terraced temple gives you a starting point for understanding the king who reunited Egypt. He belonged to the Theban Eleventh Dynasty and inherited a divided country: Thebes ruled the south, while a rival line at Herakleopolis ruled the north. He ended that division by force during a reign of about half a century. Historians conventionally date the Middle Kingdom from his reunification.

He is the reason Thebes stopped being a provincial town. Before him it was one southern centre among several; after him it was where the country was governed from, and the local god Amun began the rise that ends with Karnak. He also built, in the bay of cliff at Deir el-Bahari, a terraced mortuary complex on a rising axis — and five hundred years later Hatshepsut’s architects put her temple beside it and worked from the same idea at a larger scale.

The reunification came in the second half of the reign; the king’s Horus name was changed twice during it, and the changes are usually read as marking stages in the campaign, though what each stage was is not recorded. What followed was a rebuilding of the machinery of a single state after more than a century without one: provincial governors brought back under central appointment, quarrying and mining expeditions resumed, and Egyptian activity in Nubia restarted.

His funerary complex at Deir el-Bahari is the surviving monument of the reign. It combined a causeway from the valley, a walled forecourt planted with trees, a terrace carried on colonnades, and a rock-cut sanctuary driven into the cliff behind. Statues of the king wrapped in the tight white robe of the jubilee festival came from it, and one of them — found in a passage under the forecourt in 1900 — is among the most reproduced objects of the period.

The terraced mortuary complex at Deir el-Bahari, immediately south of where Hatshepsut’s temple was later raised. Nothing certainly of his survives standing at Karnak, though Theban temple building on any scale begins in this period.

Look towards the remains of Mentuhotep II’s temple beside Hatshepsut’s. The neighbouring buildings let you compare royal monuments separated by centuries; the earlier temple is important context for the later design.