Deir el-Medina Tours & Tickets

Every other site in Luxor is about kings. Deir el-Medina is about the people who built the kings' tombs, and it is the reason we know more about ordinary life in New Kingdom Egypt than in almost any other ancient society.

It is a village, in a dry valley on the west bank, walled and laid out on a grid, with a single main street and houses opening off it. The craftsmen who cut and painted the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived here with their families for something like four hundred years, and because they were literate, and because the desert preserves rubbish, they left behind an archive of everyday writing that has no real parallel.

What the rubbish heap contained

The villagers wrote on ostraca, flakes of limestone and pottery, because papyrus was expensive. Thousands of them survive.

They record work rosters and absences, and the reasons given for the absences are what make them famous: brewing beer, a quarrel with a wife, a scorpion sting, a mother's illness, a festival, a hangover. They record loans, sales of donkeys, disputes over a plot of land, complaints about a foreman, medical prescriptions, school exercises, laundry lists and love poems.

Out of this comes something no monument can give you: a named population. We know these people. We know that Paneb was accused by his colleagues of theft, adultery and threatening behaviour in a formal complaint that survives in full. We know the scribe Qenherkhepeshef had appalling handwriting and collected books.

The first recorded strike in history

In the twenty-ninth year of Ramesses III the grain rations that paid the workforce failed to arrive. The men downed tools, walked out of the village and staged a sit-in at the mortuary temples, refusing to move until they were fed. It happened more than once.

The events are recorded in detail on a papyrus now in Turin, and they constitute the earliest documented labour strike anywhere. It is worth standing in the main street and knowing that.

The tombs, which are the visual reward

The villagers built their own tombs in the slope above the houses, and being professional tomb decorators they did it well. The tombs of Sennedjem and Inherkha are small, deep and among the most intensely coloured painted spaces surviving from ancient Egypt: dense yellows, reds and blues on a white ground, ceilings covered edge to edge, the paint looking barely dry.

They are cramped, they require a separate ticket on top of site entry, and numbers are limited. They are also, for colour, better than most of what you will see in the Valley of the Kings.

The monastery in the name

Deir means monastery in Arabic. The name comes from the Ptolemaic temple of Hathor at the northern end of the site, which was taken over by a Coptic community in the Christian period and used as a monastery. The temple is small, well preserved and usually empty of visitors.

How to fit it in

Allow an hour, more if you take the tombs. It sits between the Valley of the Queens and Medinet Habu, so it drops into a west bank circuit without a detour.

Tickets for Sennedjem and Inherkha are sold separately and the tombs can close without notice for conservation, so check on the day rather than counting on them.

Is Deir el-Medina worth visiting?

For a first-time visitor with one west bank morning, no. The Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut and Medinet Habu have first claim on the time.

For anyone on a second visit, or anyone more interested in how people lived than in how kings were buried, it is the most quietly remarkable site in Luxor. It is the place where ancient Egypt stops being pharaohs and becomes a village with a rubbish tip full of complaints.