Deir el-Medina: The Village That Built the Valley of the Kings

Everyone goes to the Valley of the Kings. Very few people walk the short distance over the ridge to the place where the men who made it lived. Deir el-Medina is one of the most valuable archaeological sites in Egypt for a reason that has nothing to do with gold: it is the best-documented ordinary community anywhere in the ancient world.

A Village Built for One Job

The Egyptians called it Set Maat — the Place of Truth. It was a purpose-built settlement, walled, on the Luxor West Bank, housing the draughtsmen, stonecutters, plasterers and painters who cut and decorated the royal tombs, along with their families. It was occupied for roughly four centuries, across the New Kingdom, and the men who lived there worked in the valleys on a rota, sleeping in huts nearer the tombs during the working week and coming home on their days off.

You can still walk the main street. The house plans are legible — narrow, terraced, opening off a single lane inside the enclosure wall. It is a small place, and its smallness is the point: everyone knew everyone, and everything got written down.

What They Left Behind

Papyrus was expensive. Limestone flakes and broken pottery were not, and the village sat on a hillside made of them. The workmen used those flakes — ostraca — as notepaper, and tens of thousands survive.

• Attendance registers, with the reason each man was absent — illness, a family funeral, brewing beer, a scorpion sting, an argument with his wife
• Loans, IOUs and property disputes between neighbours
• Wills, marriage arrangements and divorce settlements
• Complaints about the quality of the rations, and about each other
• Practice sketches, drafts of scenes, and drawings that were clearly done for fun

The First Strike on Record

In the twenty-ninth year of the reign of Ramesses III — around 1157 BC — the rations that paid the workforce stopped arriving on time. Grain was the wage; late grain meant hungry families. The men downed tools, walked out of the work sites and staged sit-ins at the mortuary temples, refusing to move until they were paid.

A scribe named Amennakht recorded the whole affair, and the account survives on what is now known as the Turin Strike Papyrus. It is the earliest documented labour strike in human history, and it reads exactly like one: grievances stated, officials stalling, partial payment offered, the men going back out again when it did not hold.

Their Own Tombs

The workmen decorated royal tombs for a living, and then decorated their own. The village necropolis climbs the slope above the houses, and the small chapels and burial chambers there are among the most vividly painted spaces in Egypt — the tomb of Sennedjem in particular, with its intense colour and its scenes of the owner and his wife working the fields of the afterlife. They are small, they are crowded, and they were made by people who cut royal tombs all week and then did this on their own time.

Visiting

• Deir el-Medina is on the Luxor West Bank, close to the Valley of the Queens and easily added to a West Bank morning
• Entry to the decorated tombs is usually a separate ticket from the village site — check what your ticket covers before you climb
• The tombs are small, steep and hot; they empty out much faster than the Valley of the Kings
• Allow longer than you think for the village itself. Walking the street is the part that stays with people

The Valley of the Kings tells you what the pharaohs wanted said about themselves. Deir el-Medina, a twenty-minute walk away, tells you who was hungover, who owed whom a sack of grain, and what happened when the wages were late. Both are worth your morning.