Egypt Centre Collection Blog: The Village of Deir el-Medina

The blog post for the final week of the Thebes course has been written by Sandra Ottens, who has been working as a secretary at the municipality of Amsterdam for thirty years. Sandra studied Egyptology at Leiden University (BA and MA) from 2006 to 2012. She started blogging about her Egyptological adventures when her class attended a two-month study semester in Cairo, visiting a large number of excavation sites. Sandra joined the excavations in Amheida (Dakhla Oasis) as an assistant epigrapher to Professor Olaf Kaper for one season in 2012. She wrote her MA thesis on the Seven Hathors, a group of seven goddesses who predicted the fate of new-born children.

The Egypt Centre course on Thebes, the city of 100 gates, and the elaborate parade of the royal mummies through the streets of Cairo to their new home in the National Museum of Egyptian Culture have reminded me of a paper I wrote about royal tomb construction management in the New Kingdom while I was a Master’s student at Leiden University. During the New Kingdom the pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings, and other members of the royal family were buried in the Valley of the Queens. For the production of these tombs, the Egyptian state recruited crews of skilled workers and artisans who were housed in the village of Deir el-Medina (fig. 1). The villagers kept a very elaborate administration of the various stages of the building process. Only fragments of this administration have survived, but together they give interesting insights into the project organisation.

Fig. 1: The village of Deir el-Medina

The workers were paid on behalf of the state with regular deliveries of food, drink, and supplies that were sent from various temple institutions. The village administration bureau kept a log of all the deliveries received on each day and organised the distribution of the rations among the employees. It is likely that the artisans who worked on the royal tombs also helped to create the tombs of the high officials that are scattered around the hills of the West Bank, and that they received additional payments for that work (fig. 2). It is not clear how much time they would have had for these extracurricular activities, but I assume they may have been helped by other workers who were not part of the official royal tomb crew.

Fig. 2: P. Ashmolean Museum 1958.112: Mid Twentieth Dynasty the draughtsman Hormin wrote to his father, necropolis scribe Hori: “... send a message to protest to the captains that they should promote this servant of yours so that he may assist me with the drawing – I’m alone, for my brother is ill. The men of the right side have carved in relief one chamber more than the left side ... When I mentioned this [to] the high priest, the captains said to me ‘We will bring him up. It isn’t the priest’s responsibility’, so they said.”

From the administration we know that the crew that was employed for the work on the royal tomb usually consisted of forty–sixty men divided into two teams, which were referred to as the left and the right side. The documentation suggests that a crew of workers was installed at the beginning of each pharaoh’s reign (fig. 3). The men were required to swear an oath of office in the presence of the vizier, because their work was obviously highly confidential in nature. It is likely that the crew would start working on a pharaoh’s tomb in the early years of his reign, but their work may also have been divided across several locations, whenever tombs for other royals were needed.

Fig. 3: Ostracon Berlin 12654: In year 2 of the reign of Ramesses VI, the two scribes of the tomb and the two foremen organised a crew of workers. After that, the scribe of the vizier Paser came to the Deir el-Medina head office with the message that the number of workers had to be reduced to sixty and that the rest would be added to the supplies crew. The villagers were allowed to draw up the list of workers among themselves.

The administration tells us that there were regular inspection visits, probably to check the progress of the work. We know that detailed plans of the tomb were drawn, that the dimensions of the tomb were measured, and that these measurements were used to calculate the time it would take to carve a tomb out of the rocks and to decorate it. There were also attendance sheets, keeping track of the workers’ attendance and absence. The high officials who were in charge of the building project would have been able to use these documents to check the quantity and quality of the work, so that they could send regular progress reports to the royal court (fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Drawing by Howard Carter after papyrus Turin Cat. 1885, from: JEA IV (1917), pl. XXIX. Plan of the tomb of Ramesses IV. This papyrus is decorated with coloured details: a granite sarcophagus, golden doors, and a hatched rock surface around the tomb. The texts in the rooms mention measurements and the various decoration jobs that needed to be done or had been done there: making sketches, engraving with chisels, and filling in with paints. When Howard Carter and Alan Gardiner published this papyrus in 1917, they described the elaborate drawing of the sarcophagus in the tomb chamber, but they did not understand what the rectangles around the sarcophagus were meant to represent. In their article in JEA, they speculated that this might have been a temporary wooden construction for lifting the heavy granite sarcophagus lid after the funeral. It wasn’t until the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 that Howard Carter discovered a set of four gilded shrines and a canopy of fabric, which clarified the drawing published five years earlier.

After the work on the royal tomb had been finished, the tomb would be ready and waiting for the inevitable funeral of the pharaoh. The royal mummy parade through Cairo has given us an interesting modern insight into the kind of ceremony that might have been performed for an ancient Egyptian royal funeral (fig. 5). The actual burial in the Valley of the Kings would probably have been done with only a select group of people, for reasons of security. The Deir el-Medina administration tells us that the workers were sometimes employed to move items of tomb equipment, always under the strict supervision of a number of high officials.