Sources:1. Borla, Mathilde : Les Statuettes Funéraires du Musée Égyptien de Turin In: Dossiers d'Archeologie
2003
2. KMT, vol. 14, pt. 1
3. Meskell, Lynn: Intimate archaeologies : the case of Kha and Merit. IN: World Archaeology, Vol. 29,
No. 3, Intimate relationships (Feb. 1998), p. 363-379.
4. Shaw, Ian, Nicholson, Paul: British Museum dictionary of ancient Egypt
London: British Museum Press, 1995.
5. Reeves, Nicholas: Ancient Egypt : the great discoveries : a year-by-year chronicle
London : Thames & Hudson, 2000.
6. Vassilika, Eleni: The tomb of Kha : the architect
Torino : Fondazione Museo delle Antichita Egizie, 2010.
7. Russo, Barbara: Kha (TT 8) and his colleagues : the gifts in his funerary equipment and related
artefacts from Western Thebes
London : Golden House Publications, 2012.
8 https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1107/1107.5831.pdf
9. Raffaella Bianucci, Michael E. Habicht, Stephen Buckley, Joann Fletcher, Roger Seiler, Lena M.
Öhrström, Eleni Vassilika, Thomas Böni, Frank J. Rühl. "Shedding New Light on the 18th Dynasty
Mummies of the Royal Architect Kha and His Spouse Merit", in PLOS-One, July 22, 2015
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131916
Images of Deir el-Medina:
past & present
The village of Deir el-Medina
Deir el-Medina is one of the best preserved ancient settlements in Egypt. It lies in a small secluded valley in the shadow of the Theban hills,
on the west bank of the Nile, opposite modern-day Luxor in Upper Egypt.
The village was inhabited by the community of workmen involved in the construction and decoration of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Together with their wives and families, the craftsmen occupied the neatly built mud-brick and stone houses for some 450 years during the New Kingdom period.
The settlement was founded sometime early in the 18th dynasty, although it is uncertain under which king. Many bricks in the enclosure wall of the settlement were stamped with the name of Thutmosis I (c. 1524-1518 BC), who was the first pharaoh to be buried in the Valley of the Kings. However, the reverence paid to the previous king, Amenhotep I (1551-1524 BC) and his mother, Ahmose-Nefertari, suggests that they may have been instrumental in establishing the royal workforce at Deir el-Medina.
We have little information about the earliest years of the community. Most of our knowledge of the settlement comes from the extensive evidence from the 19th and 20th dynasties, when the village almost doubled in size. The initial workforce was probably drawn from a number of places, possibly from other crews in the Theban area employed on temple building projects. The original town was surrounded by a thick mud-brick wall. Since the first phase of the settlement, dating from the beginning of the 18th dynasty, was destroyed by fire, little is known about its layout. After the Amarna period, under the restoration of King Horemheb (c. 1321-1293 B.C.),
the village expanded. The damaged houses were restored and new ones built. During the 19th dynasty, Deir el-Medina covered an area of about 132 metres long and 50 metres wide. The houses within the enclosure wall were all built in blocks - there was no space between them and two adjacent houses shared a wall.
Although the village was occupied for over four centuries, the evidence from the excavations shows that the general layout of the individual houses largely follows the pattern established in the first phase of the settlement's construction during the 18th dynasty.
The ground level also remained unchanged, unlike other settlements where successive generations built on the remains of previous occupations.
The village itself consisted of about 70 houses. They were divided by a main road. It ran from north to south with narrow houses on either side. Archaeological excavations suggest that this street was covered, making the village a solidly roofed community. Both the floors of the houses and the central street were found to be covered with layers of accumulated and well-trodden animal dung from goats, sheep and pigs. (Hobson, 1997, p. 117).
In the workmen's village, property ownership was more tightly controlled - property tended to be passed from father to son, along with trades and professions. Restricted by the village boundary, the inhabitants were not able to expand their dwellings, as was often the case elsewhere. Some forty to fifty houses were later built outside the enclosure wall to the north, between or over earlier burials.
The community reached its greatest numbers and prosperity towards the end of the reign of Ramesses II (1279-1212 BC). From the end of the reign of Ramesses XI (1098-1070 BC), the Theban area was in turmoil and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings began to be plundered. Both the archaeological and textual evidence suggest that not later than by the early 21st dynasty, around the years 17-18 of Ramesses XI, the community of workmen had left Deir el-Medina and moved within the walls of the nearby temple at Medinet Habu.
Dhutmose, the scribe of the tomb, wrote to Hor, the deputy of the estate of Amun-Ra, on his visit to Thebes:
"We heard that you have arrived and reached the town of Ne; may Amun give you a good welcome, may he do all good things for you. We dwell here in the Mansion and you know well our way of dwelling. But the boys of the tomb have gone. They dwell in Ne, while I dwell here alone with the scribe of the army, Penthonakhte".
The Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III (1182-1151 BC) at Medinet Habu
as seen from the western slopes of the Theban Hills above Deir el-Medina
Although the former inhabitants no longer lived in the village, they returned to visit the family tombs and to worship at their temple of Amenhotep I. The abandoned houses were used for storage until they decayed beyond their usefulness. It is not clear what happened to the villagers after this period, but the site of Deir el-Medina continued to be used extensively for both religious and funerary purposes until as late as the 8th century AD.
In the 3rd century BC, Ptolemy IV Philopater built a temple dedicated to Hathor and Maat on the northern side of the former village, on the site of the earlier chapels and shrines and opposite the small temple of Amun. In the Christian era the temple was converted into a Coptic church. A monastery, or deir, was established there. Deir el-Medina thus survived its change in function from a primarily residential to a to a sacred and burial site.
The ancient name of the settlement, "St-maat-Hr-imnty-Wast", means "The Place of Truth, to the West of Thebes". The ancient villagers referred to their settlement as "pa-demi", "the town". The modern Arabic name Deir el-Medina, meaning "The Convent of the Town", reflects the fact that, during the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the village's Ptolemaic temple was converted into a Christian church.
"Wast" inscription from the walls of the Ptolemaic temple at
Deir el-Medina
The term "st-maat", usually translated as "the Place of Truth", appears repeatedly in tomb inscriptions and on funerary objects such as stelae, coffins, shabtis, statues, pyramidions, door lintels and door jambs, as well as on a wide variety of small objects from the Theban necropolis, particularly from the region of Deir el-Medina. A smaller number of objects come from other Theban sites, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu, Qurna and Dra abu al-Naga. A large group of titles, demoting employees "in the Place of Truth", has been identified in documents from the 19th and 20th dynasties.
"st-maat" from an
inscription on
Bankes stela no. 11
Kingston Lacy
The earliest example of the expression "st-maat" is in chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, which dates from the dynasties 13-17 (2nd Intermediate Period, ca. 1782-1633 B.C.). It reads "I have not committed any sins in the Place of Truth". The term can generally be applied to any place or locality that is sacred or holy. It was not only used within the city of Thebes. There are examples of the term being used in Memphis, Amarna or Abydos. The term cannot be translated with a single phrase because it does not have a single meaning. Depending on the context, "st-maat" can mean the afterlife, the cemetery, a tomb, the king's tomb, or even a workshop (in western Thebes). In Theban documents, "st-maat" was used with the addition "hr-imnty-Wast", meaning "west of Weset" (Weset being the ancient Egyptian name for Thebes, now Luxor). Inscriptions are found in both hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts.
Excavations at Deir el-Medina
Throughout the 19th century, objects were looted from the Deir el-Medina area to supply the new antiquities market created by foreign travellers visiting the ancient sites. The first antiquities collected by the locals around the site of Deir el-Medina were sold to passing tourists in 1815. Among them was Sir William Bankes. The collection of pieces he bought at this early stage can be seen at his family home in Dorset, Kingston Lacy. Giovanni Belzoni collected antiquities for the British Consul General Henry Salt at the same time as his rival, the French Consul General Bernardino Drovetti, was bidding against him.
Their collections were later divided mainly between the British Museum in London and the Museo Egizio in Turin.
John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875), an English traveller, writer and pioneer Egyptologist, was the first to excavate the area. He opened several tombs in order to record the remarkable information they contained. Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-1884), a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist, also copied tomb scenes at Deir el-Medina. This inevitably drew attention to the potential riches, and illegal excavations followed (Hobson, 1991, pp. 116-118). In the 1850s an archive of papyri was excavated from the family tomb of Butehamun. It included letters from his father, the scribe Djutmose, to Butehamun and the correspondence of Piankh (c. 1074-1070 BC) sent from Nubia where he was with the army. Several other papyri, probably from the same source, came onto the market at the same time and were bought by European travellers.
Eventually, the papyri and many other objects found their way into the storerooms of numerous museums to await future scholars. Most of these discoveries were made by local people. Huge amounts of information were lost as a result of their haphazard digging.
In January 1886, a local resident of Qurna, Salam Abu Duji, and his 3 associates were given permission to excavate at Deir el-Medina. They focused their attention not on the settlement area, but on the adjacent terraced hill to the west - the site of the tombs. After the first week of excavation they found an undisturbed tomb - the tomb of Sennedjem (Burzacott,2017,17-18).
The northern part of the valley was excavated down to the virgin soil. One of the most important finds was the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty foreman Kha and his wife Meryt. Between 1909 and 1912, Émile Baraize was employed by the Egyptian Antiquities Service to carry out work on the Ptolemaic temple. In 1912 he excavated a small chapel located in the north-western part of the enclosure wall of the main Ptolemaic temple (Bomann, 1991, 39).
From 1905 to 1909, the first scientific excavation of the site was carried out by the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli.
In 1906 he excavated the chapel of Seti I (Bomann, 1991, 39). Many objects, including papyri and ostraca, greatly enriched the collections of the Museo Egizio in Turin and the Museo Archeologico in Florence.
Turin had already acquired a large number of objects through the collector and dealer Bernardino Drovetti in the early 19th century.
In 1913, Georg Möller, a German palaeographer, led an excavation at four sites within the settlement as part of the Berlin Museum's season at Deir el-Medina.
as part of a large concession in western Thebes. Among his finds were 11 houses with their contents, 160 hieratic and 70 figurative ostraca, 10-13 tombs in the western cemetery and 4 infant graves in the eastern cemetery (McDowell, 1999, 25).
The German concession at Deir el-Medina was transferred to the French after World War I. The French began work at Deir el-Medina in 1917. In 1922, the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, under the direction of Bernard Bruyère, began a project of systematic excavation of the entire site - village, cemetery and pit. The Great Pit, used in ancient times as a garbage dump, was Bruyère's most rewarding discovery. It contained thousands of literary and non-literary ostraca. Bruyère also discovered thirty-two religious structures (Bomann, 1991, 39). In 1925, Bruyère was looking for an epigrapher for his excavations. Jaroslav Černý, a Czech Egyptologist, became a member of the team. He was the world's leading authority on several aspects of the Ramesside period, particularly the hieratic script, a cursive writing system used on papyri and ostraka.
Excavation Diaries of Bernard Bruyère from Deir el-Medina, 1922-1955, are now available on-line at
http://www.ifao.egnet.net/bases/archives/bruyere/about
In 1967, the IFAO gave Georges Castel permission to continue the excavations at Deir el-Medina. Although he continued the work of Baraize, Schiaparelli and Bruyère, he concentrated mainly on the excavations of Gurnet Mura'i to the north and south. Excavations by the French mission continue to this day (Brooker, 2009, 8). Domonique Valbelle and Charles Bonnet have reexamined the site to better understand the phases of construction.
A worldwide group of scholars continues to study a wide range of topics relating to all aspects of Deir el-Medina.
The research group, entitled "Workers' Huts in the Theban Mountains", began work at the site of the workers' huts in 2008. They will work for four field seasons of three months each.
The IFAO Excavations at Deir el-Medina, Cédric Gobeil's thorough examination of the archives of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO), published on Oxford Handbooks online, details the history of the archaeological excavations and other field activities conducted by the Institute at the site of Deir el-Medina since the early 20th century.
A free PDF version is available at
http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935413.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935413-e-32?rskey=vK0AHG&result=1
All the photos accompanying the "History of excavation" come from the area in the southeast corner of the main Ptolemaic temple enclosure.
The text on this page was written by Lenka Peacock
Photography © Lenka and Andy Peacock
Aerial view of Deir el-Medina
This wonderful photo of Deir el-Medina was taken by Warwick Barnard of Sydney, Australia, during his balloon flight over the Theban West Bank in the early hours of 17 January 2007. Little has changed since then. The aerial view is an ideal tool for understanding the layout of the site from east to west, where the sacred mountain of al-Qurn rises. Please use the legend below as a guide and the links for more detailed information and closer views of individual parts of the settlement.
Photography © Warwick Barnard 2007
A - The settlement
B - The Ptolemaic temple of Hathor and Ma'at
C - The Western necropolis
D - The Eastern necropolis
E - The great pit
F - The chapel of Hathor of Seti I
G - The temple of Amenhotep I
H - The temple of Amun of Ramesses II
I - The French dig house
J - Towards the rock shrine of Ptah and Meretseger
K - Sennedjem's house
L - The ancient path to the Valley of the Kings and to the stone huts at the top of the cliffs
M - Modern car park
N - The tourist rest house & bookstall
Western necropolis tombs:
TT1 - Sennedjem's tomb
TT2 - Khabekhenet's tomb
TT3 - Pashedu's tomb
TT5 - Neferabu's tomb
TT8 - Kha's tomb
Sources:
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London : Thames and Hudson, 1996.
2.David, A. Rosalie: The pyramid builders of ancient Egypt : a modern investigation of Pharaoh's workforce.
London : Routledge, 1986.
3. Černý, Jaroslav: Egypt from the death of Ramesses III to the end of the 21st dynasty.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1965.
4. Pharaoh's workers : the villagers of Deir el-Medina / edited by Leonard H. Lesko
Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994.
5. Clayton, Peter A.: Chronicles of the Pharaohs : the reign-by-reign record of the rulers and dynasties of ancient Egypt
London : Thames & Hudson, 1994.
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New York : Tauris Parke, 2003.
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London : British Museum Press, 1999.
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IN: JEA 83, p. 179-197.
9. Romer, John: Ancient lives : the story of the Pharaoh's tombmakers
London : Phoenix, 1984.
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Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.
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Cairo : Institut Francais d'archeologie Orientale du Caire, 1973.
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Freiburg (Schweiz) : Universitatsverlag, 1986.
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London : Kegan Paul International, 1991.
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Praha : Národní Museum, 2007.
15. Brooker, M. L.: A new approach of identifying the function of the elevated beds at Deir el- Medina. A thesis: The University of Birmingham, Master of Philosophy.
Birmingham : University of Birmingham, June 2009. 196 p.
16. Hobson, Christine: Exploring the world of the pharaohs
London : Thames and Hudson, 1990.
17. Burzacott, Jeff: The Tomb of Sennedjem discovered IN : Nile Magazine, no. 11, December 2017 - January 2018, pp. 17-21.
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9780199935413-e-32?rskey=vK0AHG&result=1