There is no evidence of urban planning.But a kilometer to the southwest lay a well planned and neatly constructed village of mud and stone where the men responsible for cutting and decorating the tombs of Egypt’s New Kingdom pharaohs lived with their families. It was a small village called in Egyptian, Pa Demi, The Village, or Ta Set Ma’at, The Place of Truth. Today, it goes by its Arabic name, Dayr al-Madina, The Monastery of the City. For five hundred years, Dayr al-Madina was a thriving community of architects, stone masons, draftsmen, artists, carpenters, goldsmiths, and other craftsmen. After it was abandoned at the end of the New Kingdom, only a scattering of people came here, mostly to visit a small temple nearby or to use some of its buildings for storage. In the Ptolemaic period, a small temple to Hathor was constructed north of the site. It was later converted to a Christian church and a monastery (whence the Arabic name).
But gradually, Dayr al-Madina disappeared beneath blowing sand and lay forgotten for nearly two millennia. Not until the nineteenth century did anyone realize that Dayr al-Madina was a site rich in antiquities. From 1815 to World War II, excavations, mostly illegal, recovered thousands of objects from Dayr al-Madina. Few of them were great works of art or valuable pieces of gold or silver. Most, in fact, were nothing but small sherds of limestone on which ancient scribes had written memos or practiced their drawing skills. These limestone chips, called ostraca, are the ancient equivalent of Post-It notes, and most of their texts dealt with the mundane affairs of everyday life. For an Egyptologist, these documents are treasures more valuable than gold. They allow us to visit the three-thousand-year-old world of these artisans and peer over their shoulders as they worked and played. There are marriage contracts, letters, receipts, love notes, angry complaints, inventories—thousands of documents that describe in often intimate detail the lives of the people who lived here.
During much of its history, about fifty families lived at Dayr alMadina (the number fluctuated from about forty to over a hundred) and in some cases we can trace the history of a house by a single family for a dozen generations or more. Today, we can identify seventy houses, each built of stone and mud brick in a walled town complex that covered about 5,100 square meters (53,500 square feet). There was only one entrance into the compound and it was regularly guarded, not so much to isolate the workmen as to protect the valuable materials with which they worked. Each house covered about 70 square meters (750 square feet) and followed a fairly standard plan.
Typical is the home of the workman Sennedjem, who lived during the reigns of Sety I and Rameses II. His house lies in the southwestern corner of the village, at the edge of the modern parking lot, a few meters in front of a flight of steps leading to his tomb (TT 1). Its entrance lies at the end of a long corridor paralleling the principal north-south path through the village. A doorway leads into a small foyer off which lie three storerooms, probably intended for tools, clothing, and other bric-a-brac of life, and maybe also used as servants’ quarters. One room had pots set into the floor for grain storage. To its west, a well-built door with a stone lintel led into a rectangular reception hall with a mudbrick bench standing against the south wall. Beyond lay another reception room with a (now-missing) palm trunk column on a limestone base in its center, supporting the (nowmissing) roof. A low bench along the eastern wall served as a bed or a seat, and two stelae were set into the wall above it. We know from goods placed in Sennedjem’s tomb that the furniture here included small stools and chairs,beds, boxes, chests and tables, most of it purely utilitarian, but well-made and nicely decorated. A flight of steps led to the roof. Accommodations at Dayr al-Madina were spartan, the houses small. Sennedjem, his wife Iyneferti, and their several sons and daughters probably spent a good part of their time on the roof or outside the house, talking with friends and colleagues. The menfolk, of course, worked much of the day, so most of the time the village belonged to women, children, and the elderly. Compared to the homes of most Egyptians, Dayr alMadina offered comfortable accommodations and attractive ones. The walls of the houses were painted white and they had small, red doors.
The floors were plastered. Brightly-colored textiles adorned the furniture and stelae and amulets hung from the walls. At the back of the house lay the kitchen and small room, including a cellar for food storage. There was no money used in ancient Egypt, and the government paid the workmen in kind. Sennedjem’s cellar and storerooms would have housed these monthly payments of grain (for making bread), barley (for making beer), dried fish, vegetables (such as beans, garlic, onions, and lettuce), fruits (such as pomegranates, grapes, dates, and figs), fuel for the bread oven, and water. On special occasions, there were also baskets of dates, sweet cakes, honey, wine, and spices (cumin, coriander, and dill), salt, various cooking oils, meat, and fowl. Some of these foods came raw, others ready-made, and they came in large quantities. We have records of a family receiving a payment that included several hundred loaves of bread and many liters of beer. There were also regular deliveries of cloth and clothing, furniture, cooking utensils, and lamps. Wood cutters, water carriers, fishermen, gardeners, washermen, potters, and delivery men were employed full time to serve the needs of the Dayr al-Madina craftsmen. Peer over the walls of Sennedjem’s house and look inside.
It is not difficult to imagine the evenings that he spent in these rooms, playing games with his family, telling stories, dressing for a special festival. One can imagine him sitting in the columned hall, talking to fellow workmen about the next day’s schedule. One can see him walking into the kitchen to prepare a snack of bread and spices and climbing to the roof, sitting quietly, eating beneath the stars.When Sennedjem left home each morning for work in the Valley of the Kings, he and his colleagues hiked over the hill along a path still used by tourists today. The trip takes under an hour, the return trip, because it is mostly downhill, slightly less. If the workmen chose not to return to their village at the end of the day, perhaps because of the heat, a family argument, or pressures of work, they could stay the night in one of the small stone huts built at the top of the hill. Here, the workmen could enjoy “the sweet breath of the north wind,” sitting together at dusk, talking, carving amulets and shabtis, drinking bowls of thick beer their wives had carried up from the village. Digging a royal tomb must have been generally unpleasant work. Limestone is a relatively soft material and not difficult to carve. But when shattered, its razor sharp edges can easily cut even tough skin and it produces thick dust that makes breathing and seeing difficult. Maintaining the correct axial alignment of tomb chambers, ensuring that room corners were squared and walls vertical took patience and skill. But the craftsmen did it extremely well, even in this uncomfortable environment, using nothing more than a plumb bob, a piece of string, and a carpenter’s square. Cutting the limestone was done using copper chisels and wooden mallets, chert hand-axes, and sandstone abrasives. Such simple tools could be repaired and resharpened as needed, and although simple, they worked well. Lighting the dark tomb interior was done using bowls of vegetable oil in which a wick was floated and lit. The wicks were of standard thickness and length and the rate at which they burned provided a measure of the work day. Salt was added to the oil to prevent it from smoking.
PTOLEMAIC TEMPLE
At the northern end of the village, a number of small temples were built in the New Kingdom. Some of these were replaced in Ptolemaic times, and indeed, there is a well-preserved example of a temple from that period still standing. It was begun during the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopater and work on it continued for the next sixty years, under Ptolemy VI Philometer and Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II. It was built over several earlier small temples, perhaps similar to the still-visible remains immediately north, where there is a temple of Amenhetep I, a Hathor shrine of Sety I, and a temple to the Theban Triad built by Rameses II. The Ptolemaic temple was
dedicated to the goddesses Hathor and Ma’at. It is a small building lying within a mud brick enclosure wall within which there are also tiny New Kingdom chapels erected by Dayr al-Madina’s occupants and dozens of Greek, demotic and Coptic Christian graffiti that cover its outer walls.
Within the enclosure we enter a vestibule which has two papyrus columns. A low flight of steps leads into the pronaos, defined by a pair of columns, pillars, and curtain walls. Figures on the columns show Amenhetep, son of Hapu, and Imhotep, both architects who were deified after their death. Amenhetep, son of Hapu, may have built an earlier
temple on this site. The curtain wall is covered with reliefs showing the king offering to various deities. In the rear wall of the pronaos are three doorways and above them seven Hathor heads. The three doorways each leads into a long, narrow chapel. The chapel on the left is dedicated to Amen-SokarOsiris and has well-carved reliefs whose subject is the judgment of the dead. Judgment scenes such as this are not common in temple decoration, and more often are found in tombs or on papyrus scrolls. The limbs of Ptolemaic relief figures often look like overstuffed sausages, but these are carved with greater restraint, and are well proportioned and modeled. Dog-headed genii and figures of Ptolemy IV can be seen in the doorway. On the left wall, Ma’at leads a figure of the deceased king toward the hall of judgment. Above him, forty-two judges sit ready to render their decision on his fate. Anubis and Horus weigh the heart of the deceased on a balance against the feather of Ma’at, and ibis-headed Thoth stands nearby, recording the result. A lion-hippopotamuscrocodile figure called Ammit sits nearby, ready to devour the heart of the unjust. At the far right, Osiris sits on his throne. On the rear wall, the king, Ptolemy IV Philopater, offers to Osiris and Isis. On the right wall, a bark of Sokar-Osiris stands on a pedestal, and to its right, Ptolemy VI offers to Anubis and Min.
The Ptolemies were enamored of Egyptian hieroglyphs and religious motifs and delighted in taking simple iconographic elements and making them complex. For example, look at the lintel above the door as you leave this chapel, where four-headed rams and ramheaded scarabs have been depicted.
The central chapel was dedicated by Ptolemy IV to Hathor and she receives offerings from Ptolemy IV, his sister Arsinoe, and Ptolemy VII, who continued the decoration.
The right chapel was for Amen-Ra-Osiris, and its reliefs show the king before various deities, including Hathor, Isis, Nephthys, Horus, Anubis, Mut, Amen, and others. Leaving the Ptolemaic temple enclosure, turn left (north) to a strange feature known as the Great Pit. Great it is: over 50 meters (164 feet) deep and 30 meters (98 feet) wide, it is thought to have been an attempt to dig a well so that Dayr al-Madina could have a convenient supply of water. Why such a massive excavation would have been necessary has never been explained. Water was available only a few hundred meters away in the agricultural land and could easily be transported by donkey. The search for water was not successful. Archaeologists who dug here found that work had been abandoned and the hole filled with tons of sand and pots herds.
From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a