RUINS OF ERMENT, ANCIENT HERMONTIS, UPPER EGYPT. 
These ruins are the first at which the traveller arrives on ascending the Nile above 
Thebes. There formerly existed here a larger Temple, which has long been destroyed; 
the ruins that remain are of a lesser Temple, which is supposed to have been the 
mammeisi, or “lying-in house,”—required for that triad of Egyptian mythology 
which was worshipped at Hermontis. The Temple was built by the celebrated 
Cleopatra, and Ptolemy Neocaesar, her son by Julius Caesar. It formerly consisted 
of an exterior court formed by two rows of columns, connected by low screens, a 
small transverse colonnade, and the naos or adytum divided into two chambers. 
Its sculptured decorations are of an inferior character, and strongly indicate the 
decline of Egyptian art. Here is a reservoir of hewn stone. A tradition pretends 
that Hermontis was the birth-place of Moses! 
In the foreground are the ruins of a Christian Church; its columns of red granite 
lie about in confusion. It was built during the Lower Empire out of, it is supposed, 
the ruins of the larger Temple, of which the substructions only can now be traced. 
This Church was of considerable extent, nearly two hundred feet long and ninety 
feet wide; the massive blocks of a wall, and the columns, are evidences of the 
cai’e which had been bestowed upon its erection, and that it was raised when Christ¬ 
ianity was the established religion of the land. 
In this view the length of the Temple is seen from the single erect column of 
the court, and the remaining columns of the pronaos, to the adytum; upon the 
roof of the naos is the residence of the Sheik of Erment, and every available spot 
within and about the Temple is occupied by the mud-huts of the inhabitants,— a 
desecration common to all the sacred structures of ancient Egypt. 
