The village of the men who cut and painted the royal tombs — the most completely documented community to survive from the ancient world.
Deir el-Medina is a walled village of small stone-and-mudbrick houses in a dry bay on the Luxor west bank, between the Valley of the Queens and the Ramesseum. You can walk the length of its single main street in a couple of minutes.
The men who lived here cut and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. They were craftsmen, not slaves — draughtsmen, sculptors, plasterers and painters, housed together and paid in rations.
No other site in Egypt tells you about ordinary life this well. The villagers were literate, they wrote on limestone flakes and broken pottery because papyrus was expensive, and they threw the flakes into a pit. Thousands survive. They record work rosters, sick days, borrowed tools, marriage disputes, wills, complaints about a foreman, a dream book, and love poems. Almost everything specific that is known about how an ancient Egyptian household actually functioned comes out of this one village.
They also recorded the first documented strike in history. In year 29 of Ramesses III the rations failed to arrive, and the workmen downed tools and sat outside the mortuary temples until they were paid. The account of it was written down here.
And they built their own tombs on the slope above the village. These are small, and because the men who cut them decorated tombs for a living, the painting is superb. The tomb of Sennedjem is the one usually named, and it is as vivid as anything in the royal valleys, at a fraction of the scale.
The village was founded in the early 18th dynasty and occupied for roughly four hundred years, through to the end of the 20th dynasty, when work on the royal tombs stopped and the community dispersed.
It housed something like sixty to seventy families at its height. The workforce was a single crew divided into a right side and a left side, each under its own foreman and its own scribe — terminology borrowed from the crew of a ship.
A Ptolemaic temple to Hathor and Maat stands at the northern end of the site. It was later taken over as a Coptic monastery, and that is where the modern name comes from: Deir el-Medina means the monastery of the town.
Sennedjem's tomb was opened intact in 1886, its painted chamber sealed since the 19th dynasty. An Italian mission under Ernesto Schiaparelli found a second undisturbed burial in 1906 — Kha, an overseer of works, and his wife Merit, with their furniture, linen and tools still in place. That household is in Turin now.
Bernard Bruyère then dug here for the French institute in Cairo from 1922, clearing the houses, the cemeteries and the great pit north of the village — a shaft sunk as a well, abandoned dry, then used as a dump. It held thousands of inscribed flakes.
Morning. The bay it sits in has no shade at all and holds heat through the afternoon.
Opening hours: Daytime hours with seasonal variation.
Opening hours and ticket prices may change. Please confirm the latest details before visiting.
The southern valley of the Theban necropolis, where queens and royal children were buried — and where the finest painted tomb in Egypt is cut into the rock.
A sunrise flight over the west bank — temples, tombs, sugar cane fields and the Nile, from a few hundred metres up.
The mortuary temple of Ramesses III — the best-preserved painted colour of any large temple in Egypt, and almost always empty.
Two enormous seated statues standing in a field — all that is easily visible of what was once the largest temple in Egypt.
Three colonnaded terraces cut into a cliff wall at Deir el-Bahari — the mortuary temple of the woman who ruled Egypt as king.
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