The administrative and economic workings of the memorial temples of the New Kingdom pharaos on the west bank of the Nile, are relatively well-documented. The author has collected the entire corpus of textual evidence available on this group of important economic institutions. The material has been organized by genre and by subject-matter, and analysed in order to arrive at a model of a New Kingdom temple as an economic unit. The relevant temple departments, personnel and their supervision, have been described as accurately as is allowed by the documentation. In addition, due attention has also been paid to the economic relationships between temples in Thebes, as well as to the transfers between the Theban memorial temples and government departments.