Beni Hasan

Beni Hasan is a row of rock-cut tombs high in a limestone cliff on the east bank of the Nile in Minya governorate, in Middle Egypt. A stair climbs from the road to a terrace with the tomb entrances along it.

Thirty-nine tombs were cut here for the provincial governors of the Oryx nome in the Middle Kingdom. Four are normally open.

What is painted on the walls is unlike almost anything in Luxor. These are not gods and afterlife texts. They are daily life at close range: metalworkers and potters at their benches, flax being harvested, boats being built, cattle counted, women weaving, musicians, dancers, board games, and a full-scale hunt in the desert.

The wrestling walls are the famous part. In the tombs of Baqet III and Kheti, hundreds of pairs of wrestlers are painted in rows, each pair in a slightly different hold, the two figures picked out in contrasting colours so you can follow the limbs. Read in sequence they work like a movement study, and they are the best surviving evidence for how the sport was actually done.

There is also the procession in the tomb of Khnumhotep II: a group of people labelled as Aamu, arriving from the eastern desert with their families, their donkeys and their goods, painted in patterned woollen clothing that is nothing like Egyptian dress. It is one of the most-discussed images in Egyptian art, and it is on the wall in front of you.

The tombs belong to the 11th and 12th dynasties, roughly four thousand years old, and were cut for nomarchs — the hereditary governors who ran the provinces with real independence before the crown reined them in.

Khnumhotep II's tomb is the best dated. His biographical inscription, among the longest private texts of the Middle Kingdom, records how his family gained the governorship, and the caption to the procession dates it to year six of Senusret II, with thirty-seven Aamu bringing black eye-paint. His is the last of the great painted tombs here; across Egypt the monumental provincial governors' tombs fade out within a generation, by the reign of Senusret III.

Their architecture borrows from the living: porticoes with fluted columns cut from the solid rock, sometimes called proto-Doric because they anticipate a Greek form by more than a thousand years.

Two kilometres south, cut into the side of a wadi in the same escarpment, is the Speos Artemidos, a rock-cut chapel of Hatshepsut dedicated to the lioness goddess Pakhet, carrying an inscription in which she describes repairing the damage left by the Hyksos.

Percy Newberry published the painted tombs for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1893 and 1894, in the Archaeological Survey series, with F. Ll. Griffith contributing the later volumes on the hieroglyphs and technical detail in 1896 and 1900. One of the draughtsmen tracing the walls for Newberry was Howard Carter, then seventeen and new to Egypt. John Garstang followed, clearing hundreds of ordinary shaft burials on the slope below between 1902 and 1904 and recovering the wooden models of boats, granaries and workshops buried with them.

• The wrestling sequences in the tombs of Baqet III and Kheti
• The procession of Aamu arriving in the tomb of Khnumhotep II
• Craft workshops, harvests and hunts painted at eye level
• Rock-cut porticoes with fluted proto-Doric columns
• The view over the Nile valley from the terrace outside the tombs
• A fortress under attack, painted in the same tombs as the wrestling rows
• The long biographical inscription of Khnumhotep II