Deir el-Medina

Who lived at Deir el-Medina?

Deir el-Medina was home to the state-employed stonecutters, plasterers, scribes, draughtsmen and painters who made the royal tombs, along with their families, for more than 400 years. They called themselves the Servants in the Place of Truth. The village was founded early in the 18th Dynasty and abandoned at the end of the 20th, when the Valley of the Kings stopped being used.

At its height around 70 houses stood inside a walled enclosure along a single main street. The crews worked in two gangs, the "right side" and "left side", walking over the hill to the royal valley and sleeping in stone huts on the ridge during the working days of the ten-day Egyptian week. They were paid in grain, fish, vegetables, oil and firewood.

The Arabic name means "Monastery of the Town", after the Coptic monks who later occupied the small temple at the northern end.

Today you walk down the old main street between knee-high stone walls. Many houses had a front room with a raised platform, a living room with a column, small bedrooms, and a kitchen at the back open to the sky, with steps to the roof. Some front rooms held household shrines to the dwarf god Bes and the hippo goddess Taweret, protectors of childbirth.

Which tombs can you go inside?

The workers used their skills on their own tombs, and the best of them are as finely painted as many royal ones; the tomb of Sennedjem is the star. The tombs are cut into the western hillside above the village, some once topped by small mud-brick pyramids, a few of which have been rebuilt.

• Sennedjem (TT1): a single vaulted burial chamber covered with bright paintings on a yellow ground. Sennedjem and his wife Iyneferti plough and harvest in the Field of Reeds, the ideal afterlife, and Anubis tends his mummy. Found intact in 1886, its contents are now in museums in Cairo and New York.
• Inherkhau (TT359): a foreman under Ramesses III and IV, with a famous scene of the great cat of Ra killing the serpent Apophis under a sacred tree.
• Pashedu (TT3): reached down a steep, narrow passage, with Anubis as a jackal guarding the entrance and Pashedu drinking beneath a palm by a pool.

Which tombs are open changes, and at the time of writing one or more may require an extra ticket, so check at the ticket office.

What do the ostraca reveal about daily life?

Thousands of ostraca, inscribed flakes of limestone and pottery, were found here, giving the most detailed picture of ordinary working life anywhere in ancient Egypt. Many came from a deep pit north of the village excavated by the French archaeologist Bernard Bruyère, who dug at Deir el-Medina from 1922 to 1951.

They include laundry lists, sales of donkeys and coffins, court cases, love poems, prayers and sketches. Work registers record why men missed a shift: brewing beer, an eye problem, a scorpion sting, or embalming a relative. Because so many villagers could read and write, Deir el-Medina is the core source for our guide to daily life in ancient Egypt.

Was there really a strike here?

Yes. In year 29 of Ramesses III, about 1157 BC, the crew downed tools because their grain rations were weeks late, in what is often called the first recorded strike in history. The workers marched to the mortuary temples on the West Bank, sat down behind them, and refused to leave, telling officials "we are hungry".

The protest is recorded on the Turin Strike Papyrus, attributed to the scribe Amennakht. It took several rounds of protest before the rations were paid, a sign that the state was struggling in the later years of Ramesses III's reign.

How do you visit Deir el-Medina?

Deir el-Medina is a short drive from the Valley of the Queens and Medinet Habu, about 25–30 minutes by car from East Bank hotels. Allow an hour, or 90 minutes if you want to see the Temple of Hathor, a small Ptolemaic temple begun by Ptolemy IV with well-preserved reliefs, at the north end of the village.

The tombs are tiny, so only a handful of people fit at once, and guards may stagger entry. Steps into Sennedjem and Inherkhau are manageable, while Pashedu is steep and cramped. Buy tickets at the site and check current prices on egymonuments.gov.eg.

A path climbs from near the village over the ridge to the Valley of the Kings, roughly the route the workers took, with views over the whole West Bank. It is hot and exposed: walk it only in the cooler months, with a guide, plenty of water and an early start.