Location: It is situated 2.4 miles north to Deir Anba Bishoy .
Who built it? It was founded by St. Macarius in 340 AD
Why was it built? it was built in the place where St. Macarius the Great settled, in 340, when he devoted himself to monastic life. Explanation : This Monastery is very probably the first monastery established in Wadi El-Natrun . The modern name of the monastery, al-Baramus, is Arabic and is derived from the Coptic christian Pa-Rameos, which means "that of the Romans" in the honor of Maximus and Domidus , two sons of the Roman Emperor Valentinus who died from excessive fasting. Their bodies were buried in a crypt below the Church of the Virgin .
The monastery also had a number of important visitors, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, who recorded to us the number of the monks who lived in the monastery. Today, the monastery is inhabited by some fifty monks, as the Arab historian al-Maqrizi visited the monastery and was responsible for identifying it as that of St. Moses the Black. Since 1996, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Leiden have financed the archaeological research on the remains of the site commonly known as Deir Anba Mussaal-Aswad (Monastery of Moses the Black).