17 March 2000 (morning)

The rock and mud brick walls of Deir el-Medina

When we pull into the parking lot at the ancient village of Deir el Medina, we find we’re early enough to have the site mostly to ourselves. 

Deir el-Medina dates to the beginning of the New Kingdom (18th Dynasty, roughly 1500 BC) and was a company town, home to the workers who cut and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It offers a rare three-dimensional view of Egyptian life, even if that life wasn’t exactly typical. Restoration work has focused on capping and conserving walls, and as we get out of the bus it feels like we’ve stumbled across the remains of an enormous rock-built honeycomb.

Looking down on the village of Deir el-Medina

The ancient Egyptians were apparently no different from the rest of us and liked to avoid a long commute. Unless they were off on assignment — building pyramids; collecting gold, incense, and exotic animals in the mysterious land of Punt; conquering the enemies of Egypt and returning with a lovely pile of chopped-off hands to prove the body count — they mostly stuck close to their farms and the Nile. Unfortunately, most of those homes were built of mud brick and, durable though it is, it just doesn’t hold up well when subjected to occasional flooding.

Deir el-Medina, however, was far enough from water to leave at least the foundations relatively intact, even after 3500 years of exposure. It was excavated starting in the early 1900s (by men who made hash of it), and then seriously studied from the 1920s until the 1950s by French Egyptologist Bernard Bruyere and Czech Egyptologist Jaroslav Cerny .

Looking up at Deir el-Medina tombs

The Deir el-Medina artisans were literate, skilled, and highly organized. They left behind reams of records jotted on everything from papyrus to ostraca (bits of broken pottery, the archaic equivalent of scrap paper).

So we have their documents, their homes, and their graves (situated on a rise above the village), and among our group we have enough knowledgable scholars to gossip about the workers like we’re discussing old friends.

Fun though it will be to examine the ruins, Deir el-Medina is perhaps best known for its gorgeous tombs, so we make a beeline for them first. Even the courtyard chapels of the tombs in this necropolis were charming; many of them featured small pyramids, including the one we’ll visit first (TT1), which belonged to Sennedjem, “Servant in the Place of Truth” (but more practically, a mason) during the 19th Dynasty.

Sennedjem and his wife enjoy a game of Senet. Photo courtesy of Mamienfr, Wikimedia Commons.

Sennedjem’s tomb is pure eye-candy, abundant color and decoration in a space as cozy and inviting as any home for eternity could hope to be, including an elegant vaulted ceiling in the burial chamber. It was intact when it was discovered in 1886 and stuffed with funerary furniture, coffins, and mummies. It turned out to be a family sepulcher, with at least three generations of Sennedjem’s kin in residence. It’s really too much to absorb without a chance for long contemplation, so looking around I mostly feel dazed, but can at least capture a feeling for his happy afterlife as he and his wife enjoy a game of Senet.

Cheerful farmers at work in the fields of Aaru. Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

On another wall, cheerful farmers are at work in the fields of Aaru, while yet other scenes depict such interesting things as a knife-wielding cat slaying an enormous snake.

Knife-wielding cat in the tomb of Sennedjem. With many thanks for this image to Jon Hirst at Osiris.net

After admiring Sennedjem’s tomb, we shift to the tomb of Inherkhau, who was “Foreman of Crew” sometime in the 20^th Dynasty. It’s suffered some damage, but still features many beautiful scenes from The Book of Gates.

That’s all we have time for today, so we return to the stone foundations and mud brick walls of the village. My head is still so full of expansive afterlife images that it’s hard to transition to these modest dwellings. The houses are small and closely packed. Main Street is so narrow, Chaz can span it with his arms.

Dr. Kent Weeks

If you’d like to learn more about the village of Deir el-Medina and surrounding area, then I recommend starting with The Theban Mapping Project. For more than three decades, Dr. Kent Weeks has been the heroic force behind this mind-bending effort to, “… map and database every archaeological, geological, and ethnographic feature in Thebes.”

And if you’d like to explore the gorgeous Deir el-Medina tombs in detail, then I recommend Osirisnet.net, a website loaded with great information and photos.