The workers' village in the Valley of the Workers is a must see for all visitors to Upper Egypt. The Arabic name, Deir el-Medina, means the "City Monastery" because the Ptolemaic temple of Hathor was used as a monastery during the Coptic Christian period.

  The village was founded during the Eighteenth Dynasty by Tuthmosis I and was called Set Maat, the Place of Truth, perhaps even, the Place of Order.

   The village was inhabited by some 400 of the gifted artisans and their families who built the tombs of the Pharaohs, so one can imagine, when they came to building their own family tombs in the nearby Necropolis, they were truly magnificent, and made with tender loving care.

  The village has a main street with some 70 dwellings, within the village walls and an additional 50 buildings outside. The houses were very similar with a reception hall, a main second room, a work room, bedroom and kitchen with cellars and stairs up to an open terrace on the flat roof for cool evenings.

 

 

     During our first visits in 1989 it was possible to walk through the houses  and see the colourfully plastered walls and the various kitchen paraphernalia littered about, storage jars, grain grinding querns, floor tiles, but these days the entry ways through the village wall are sealed off and entry is forbidden, but by walking along the pathway just above the east wall of the village one can get a good view into all the houses, a zoom lens being very useful.

     The must-see on a visit to Deir el-Medina are the Tombs of the Workers. These are the people built the tombs of the Pharaohs so when they got around to making their own tombs every one of them is a work of the highest quality, and unlike the sombre traditionally restricted style of the royal tombs, they built their own tombs with love and individual care.

 

The tomb of Pashedu

 

 There 3 tombs easily accessible to the public, all magnificent, Pashedu, Inherkhau and the one which is my favourite, that of Sennedjem. The latter tomb being the inspiration for the Ancient Egyptian Spiritual Tarot Cards of Marcus Wodensis, as illustrated of the Gateway to Heaven page.

 

 The tomb of Sennedjem

 

click on     thumbnail

The contents of the tomb of Sennedjem

    After the tombs a walk through the village to the Ptolemaic Temple and the Chapel of Hathor is well worth the trouble. There is an abundance of reliefs.

 

The Ptolemaic Temple

 

    As in most temples should one start to look at minor carvings on the stone walls with a sharp eye one will find Coptic crosses and texts in Greek, signs that the temple had been used by the Christians after the fall of the pagan gods. Signs of use by Christians can be found at Hatchepsut's Temple, Karnak, Luxor and many a temple became a Monastery, later being usurped by the militant Islamic faith.

 Some more thumbnails for you that are not on the projector

   After the temple tour ask the Temple Guard to take you the few yards walk to the Pit of Ostrakon. But please be careful, this place is dangerously deep with sides of crumbling rock and loose scree. The place is littered with pottery and artefacts from the 18th Dynasty through to modern times, but please remember that the authorities do not look kindly on anyone taking antiquities home as souvenirs, so be careful what you pick up.

Click on King Tut for the Great Pit of Ostrakon