The design of Ramesses's mortuary temple adheres to the standard canons of New Kingdom temple architecture. Surviving records indicate that work on the project began shortly after the start of his reign and continued for 20 years. Ramesses II modified, usurped, or constructed many buildings from the ground up, and the most splendid of these, in accordance with New Kingdom royal burial practices, would have been his memorial temple: a place of worship dedicated to pharaoh, god on earth, where his memory would have been kept alive after his death. Usermaatra-setepenra was the prenomen of Ramesses II. It was originally called the House of millions of years of Usermaatra-setepenra that unites with Thebes-the-city in the domain of Amon. The name – or at least its French form Rhamesséion – was coined by Jean-François Champollion, who visited the ruins of the site in 1829 and first identified the hieroglyphs making up Ramesses's names and titles on the walls. It is located in the Theban Necropolis in Upper Egypt, on the west of the River Nile, across from the modern city of Luxor. The Ramesseum is the memorial temple (or mortuary temple) of Pharaoh Ramesses II ('Ramesses the Great', also spelled 'Ramses' and 'Rameses').
