Beni Hasan: The Tomb Walls Covered in Wrestling

There is a stretch of cliff on the east bank of the Nile, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor, that almost no visitor to Egypt sees. Thirty-nine rock-cut tombs were carved into it around four thousand years ago for the governors of the region. Four are open. Two of them are covered, wall to wall, in wrestling.

Where and When

Beni Hasan sits in the Minya governorate in Middle Egypt, a part of the country most itineraries fly straight over on the way south. The tombs belong to the Middle Kingdom — broadly the 11th and 12th dynasties, around 2000 to 1800 BC — and were cut for nomarchs, the provincial governors who ran their districts with a good deal of independence from the crown.

That independence shows in the tombs. These are not royal burials following a fixed programme. They are the tombs of powerful regional families, and what they chose to put on the walls is closer to a record of provincial life than to the funerary theology you see in the Valley of the Kings.

The Wrestling

The tombs of Baqet III and his son Kheti carry the scenes everyone comes for. Across the walls, in ordered rows, pairs of wrestlers are painted working through hold after hold — some two hundred pairs in a single tomb. The two figures in each pair are painted in contrasting colours, which is what makes the scenes readable: you can follow whose limb is whose through a throw.

• The pairs are sequential rather than decorative — they document positions, transitions and outcomes in order
• Contrasting body colours separate the two wrestlers, a solution to a genuine visual problem that anyone who has tried to photograph a grapple will appreciate
• Alongside the wrestling are scenes of military training and siege, suggesting the governors kept and drilled their own forces

The Other Famous Wall

In the tomb of Khnumhotep II is a scene that has generated more scholarly literature than the wrestling: a group of foreigners, labelled as Aamu, arriving with their families, livestock and goods, wearing distinctive coloured woollen clothing quite unlike Egyptian dress. It is one of the earliest detailed Egyptian depictions of people from the Levant, and it has been pulled into arguments about trade, migration and biblical chronology for over a century. Standing in front of it, what registers first is simply how carefully individual the figures are.

Going There

• Beni Hasan is reached from Minya, roughly a four-hour drive south of Cairo, and there is a short climb from the road up to the tomb terrace
• It is normally visited as part of a longer Middle Egypt route rather than as a day trip from anywhere
• The site is quiet in a way almost nowhere else in Egypt is — it is entirely normal to have a tomb to yourself
• Access arrangements in Middle Egypt change from time to time and are worth confirming when you plan rather than assuming

Egypt's headline sites are extraordinary and busy. Beni Hasan is extraordinary and empty, and the walls are covered in people throwing each other around — which is not what most visitors expect a four-thousand-year-old tomb to be about.