Deir el-Medina

A front room you can still read

From the permitted paths, follow the surviving outlines of rooms, doorways and streets. These remains help you picture a compact settlement without entering fragile or restricted structures.

Each house is a strip off the street: an entrance room with a built platform against one wall, then a main room with a stone column base in the middle of the floor and a low bench along the side, then small back rooms, a cellar under the floor, and the stump of a stair to the roof.

Fact — the plan and its elements. Uncertain — what the platform in the front room was for. It has been read as a birthing bed, a household shrine and an ordinary couch, and specialists do not agree.

Domestic architecture adds a different perspective to the temples and tombs. Here, the spaces of a working community can be read alongside its written records.

The workmen gave themselves pyramids

The slope of the western hill, directly above the houses

A terrace of small tomb chapels, several with steep mud-brick pyramids standing over them, each with a shaft beside or beneath it going down to a painted chamber.

Fact — the chapels, their pyramids, their date, and that royal pyramid building had ended before them. Interpretation — that the workmen chose the form because the kings had given it up. No text says why they used it, and mainstream sources do not fix an interval between the two.

Pyramids had been royal for centuries, and royal pyramid building in Egypt had ended generations before these small ones were raised. So the men who cut the kings’ hidden tombs are the ones with pyramids over their graves, and the kings they worked for are not.

The well that never found water

The great shaft at the north end of the village, outside the enclosure wall

A very deep shaft sunk into the rock, wide at the top and stepped, dug in the hope of reaching the water table and abandoned when it did not.

It was then used as a rubbish tip, and thousands of the ostraca that tell us how these people lived came out of it. Much of what this village has told us about daily life in ancient Egypt was retrieved from a failed well the villagers had been throwing their paperwork into.

A burial chamber painted like woven cloth

Inside the decorated tombs on the hillside, when they are open

In Sennedjem’s tomb, look for the family working in the Field of Reeds: an ideal afterlife with fertile land and abundant produce. Check whether this tomb is open before planning around it.

The scenes draw on familiar agricultural work to express hopes for the afterlife. Association with a community of artists does not tell us exactly who painted each wall.