- Time needed
- 1–2 hours, depending on how many tomb groups you visit
- Heat exposure
- High
- Shade
- Low
- Stairs
- Each tomb group means a climb up the hillside first; inside, several chapels are entered down a few steps, and the shafts to the actual burial chambers are not part of the visit
A private Theban tomb of this kind follows a recognisable plan, repeated with variations across the hillside. A courtyard leads to a chapel cut into the rock: typically a broad transverse hall running across the entrance, sometimes followed by a narrower hall running back into the hill, ending in a niche that could hold statues of the owner and his family. Somewhere in the floor — in the court, the hall, or both — a shaft descends separately to the actual burial chamber, usually plain and not part of the visit. Above the entrance of a number of chapels stood a small steep mudbrick pyramid, echoing in miniature a form the kings themselves had abandoned centuries before.
- 1A banquet for the afterlife
Banquet scenes in decorated private chapels; the subjects and their positions vary by tomb
- 2The work that paid for the tomb, scene by scene
The inner hall of a chapel, in the long registers running toward the back
- 3How high a man could cut, and why
Step back and look at the hillside as a whole, not into any single tomb
- 4The same two people, painted again and again
Throughout any chapel, in scene after scene
1A banquet for the afterlife
Men and women seated in rows at a feast, served food and wine by attendants, entertained by musicians and dancers, garlanded with lotus flowers.
2The work that paid for the tomb, scene by scene
Ploughing behind oxen, sowing, the grain harvest, men working a marsh among reeds and rising birds — the estates and duties that were the owner’s actual livelihood, set out register by register.
3How high a man could cut, and why
Doorways and courtyard cuttings scattered across the slope in real density, some low near the cultivation, others cut high up the hill.
Fact — the density and spread of tomb entrances across the hillside. Interpretation — reading position and scale as a direct proxy for rank; the correlation is broadly accepted but not a fixed rule, and some well-placed tombs belong to officials whose exact standing is not otherwise well documented.
4The same two people, painted again and again
The tomb owner and his wife, seated or standing side by side, repeated through the chapel, sometimes with children shown small at their feet or under a chair.
Sloping, sandy and uneven; the paths between tomb entrances are unpaved and cut by low walls and thresholds Each tomb group means a climb up the hillside first; inside, several chapels are entered down a few steps, and the shafts to the actual burial chambers are not part of the visit
Visit mode keeps the sequence, the details and the facilities. The history, the figures and the related reading are in plan mode.