Armant

Armant is a town on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor Governorate, about 19 kilometres south of Thebes. In antiquity it was Hermonthis, the Heliopolis of Montu, and it was an important Middle Kingdom town enlarged under the Eighteenth Dynasty. A temple of the war god Montu stood here from at least the Eleventh Dynasty, and Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II is the earliest builder known with certainty; the later temple, begun under Nectanebo II and continued by the Ptolemies, with a birth house added by Cleopatra VII and Caesarion, survived into the nineteenth century before being recycled to build a sugar factory, and only the pylon of Thutmose III remains. The Bucheum on the desert edge north of the town was the burial place of the sacred Buchis bulls, in use from Nectanebo II until the mid fourth century AD. Under Cleopatra VII Hermonthis became the capital of the fourth Upper Egyptian nome, and it stayed in use through the Coptic era.