RUINS OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE GRAND COURT 
OF THE TEMPLE OF MEDINET ABOU. 
During- the Lower Empire the town or village of Medinet Abou was still inhabited, 
and upon the introduction of Christianity the members of this Church converted one 
of the deserted courts of the great Temple into a place for their own worship. The 
small columns which are seen in this view once supported the rafters which were 
inserted into the ancient entablature. Under the shade thus afforded the early Christians 
assembled, and continued until it was adopted into the Greek Church, when the altar 
was placed against the wall at the east end facing the spectator, in a recess with a 
semi-circular roof, built also out of the fragments of the heathen Temple. The ancient 
sculptures with which the walls were covered they carefully plastered over with the 
mud of the Nile, to conceal the idolatrous emblems of their pagan ancestors. To 
this circumstance we owe the preservation of the sculptures and hieroglyphics which 
enriched the wall, from which the plaster has now been removed. 
There are small apartments at the back of this building which the Christian priests 
appropriated, and houses of crude brick were erected on the ruins of the ancient 
village and within the precincts of the Temple. 
The size of the Church and the extent of the village prove its Christian population 
to have been considerable, and show that Thebes held a rank among the principal 
dioceses of the Coptic Church. That it was the Church of a Greek see, and that the 
bishop resided here, there is little doubt; — indeed, devices and inscriptions on the 
walls remove any. It has been conjectured that this was Maximinianopolis, where 
the Christians had a large church until the period of the Arab invasion. Wilkinson 
met with the name of a bishop of this diocese in the eastern desert; but Pococke 
supposes this see to have been the modern Medamout, near Thebes. 
With the inroad of the Arabs it is, however, certain that the Christians of Medinet 
Abou were dispersed, and a period put to the existence there of a Christian Church. 
Its timid community fled on the approach of the invaders to the neighbourhood of 
Esne, and their former dwellings ceased to hold a place among the inhabited villages 
of Thebes. 
Roberts’s Journal. 
Wilkinson’s Egypt and Thebes. 
