But, in another lesson of history, Senenmut’s demise was as swift as his rise to power. His tomb, prepared with such care, remained empty; and his other monuments suffered posthumous persecution. Without heirs to look after his memory—he never married—his role in creating the first great monument of western Thebes was forgotten, until resurrected by Egyptologists 3,500 years after his death.
Alongside the causeway of Hatshepsut’s temple, and likewise designed to share in its aura, lies the tomb of Senenmut’s spiritual descendant. Though he lived eight hundred years later, Montuemhat was as deeply committed to the royal court and to Thebes. His name, too, paid homage to one of the city’s deities, in this case its war-god Montu. As in Senenmut’s case, it was an appropriate choice. Where Senenmut had been the architect of spectacular monuments for his royal mistress, Montuemhat was the architect of Thebes’ very survival, at its darkest hour, in the chaos of a military invasion. Though largely ignored by modern commentators, Montuemhat ranks as a towering figure of his own age, and one of the most influential in the long history of Egypt. He lived during an extraordinary period bridging the eighth and seventh centuries BC, when Egypt was locked in an epic clash of civilisations with the kingdoms of Kush and Assyria.
Montuemhat was born just as the kingdom of Kush was tightening its grip over the entire Nile Valley. His career blossomed under the greatest of the black pharaohs, Taharqo, and he became Governor of Upper Egypt as well as a priest in the cult of Amun-Ra of Karnak. Montuemhat’s marriage to a royal princess consolidated his position at the heart of government. But then, in the space of a mere decade, Egypt was convulsed by five successive Assyrian invasions, as warrior kings from Nineveh sought to incorporate the Nile Valley into their expanding empire.
The first test for Thebes came in 667 BC, when the Assyrians led by their king Esarhaddon conquered the whole of Egypt, from the marshlands of the Delta to the First Cataract. They imposed an imperial structure of government on Egypt, appointing governors to rule the provinces on their behalf. By dint of his remarkable political skills, Montuemhat emerged from the crisis not only unscathed but officially recognised by the Assyrians as ruler of Thebes. While paying lip service to his position as an Assyrian vassal, he deftly maintained the old order throughout his Theban realm, and seems to have negotiated successfully with the Assyrians to spare the sacred buildings of Thebes.
However, just three years later, provoked by an Egyptian counter-assault, the forces of the new Assyrian king Ashurbanipal—a man who hunted lions in his leisure time—swept down through the Nile Valley once more. After the fall of Memphis, the humiliated pharaoh turned tail and fled southwards towards Thebes, with the Assyrians in hot pursuit. Despite feverish preparations, there was only so much that could be done to resist a concerted attack by a well-prepared and well-equipped army. The Assyrians were masters of every conceivable type of military technology. In urban wafare, they were peerless: with a lethal combination of tunnels, battering rams and scaling ladders, the Assyrian army rendered even the strongest of fortifications completely ineffective. Besides sheer firepower, there was also the most lethal weapon in Ashurbanipal’s armoury: psychological warfare. The Assyrians were notoriously merciless towards towns and peoples that resisted conquest. Towns that did not capitulate immediately could expect to be demolished and put to the torch, once they had fallen. Their inhabitants were likely to be slaughtered or deported to far-flung outposts of the Assyrian empire to carry out forced labour. In the face of such overwhelming force, no city in the Near East had successfully repelled an Assyrian assault. Thebes, with its largely unprotected residential quarters and vulnerable temples, stood no chance.
The expected attack was swift, fierce and unrelenting. Assyrians swarmed through the streets, butchering anyone who stood in their way, ransacking houses and looting workshops as they headed for the city’s two great temples. At Karnak, they made straight for the treasury, carrying away fourteen centuries of accumulated riches to adorn Ashurbanipal’s royal palace at Nineveh. The sack of Thebes reverberated through the ancient world as a cultural calamity of epic proportions. As ruler of Thebes and guardian of its ancient traditions, Montuemhat faced a daunting prospect. Yet, in the space of just eight years, workmen under his direction succeeded in rebuilding and restoring the temples of Thebes. Under his wise leadership, everything was restored to its former glory. It was his proudest achievement in a long and distinguished career.
Montuemhat survived in office to see Egypt regain its sovereignty under a new royal dynasty, and officiated at the ceremony at Karnak in 656 BC at which Princess Nitiqret was installed as the future God’s Wife of Amun. Thanks to his dedication, his city—and, with it, the cultural traditions of pharaonic Egypt—survived invasion, destruction and multiple regime change.
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, the east bank of Thebes (modern Luxor) has been the land of the living, the main centre of population, while the west bank has been the realm of the dead. Yet, among the tombs where kings, queens and courtiers slumber for eternity, people have always made a living. For a few, the afterlife has proved good business. At all periods, the communities of western Thebes have been small, specialised and especially close-knit. The best-known of all such communities, and the exemplar of daily life under the pharaohs, is the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina.
It comes as a surprise to round the bend in the road and see, instead of yet more hillsides honeycombed with tomb entrances, an intact walled settlement spread out like a model village. Thanks to the thousands of documents and jottings recovered from its ruins, which record everything from laundry lists to love songs, it is the archetype of ancient Egyptian village life. And yet it was absolutely atypical, a community apart in every sense. The village did not grow up organically, but owed its existence to an act of royal patronage. When King Amenhotep I (1514–1493 BC) of the Eighteenth Dynasty decided to found a new royal necropolis in a remote wadi in the Theban Hills, known today as the Valley of the Kings, he realised that he would require a dedicated workforce to construct his tomb and those of his descendants. Bringing workers across the Nile from the east bank was impractical, and the secrecy of the work—building the pharaoh’s eternal resting-place—demanded a workforce shut off from the outside world. His solution, his foundation, was the village of Deir el-Medina. Its location is inspired: out of sight, hidden from view behind a range of hills, yet within easy walking distance of both the cultivation and the Valley of the Kings. Guard-posts on the surrounding hills provided round-the-clock security (as they do today). To ensure that nobody got in or out without state sanction, a thick stone wall was built around the village by Amenhotep I’s successor. Deir el-Medina is the original gated community.
Inside the walls, a main street runs the length of the village, with houses opening off either side. Each house typically had a front room for receiving visitors and a back room with a small courtyard for domestic activities. A staircase led to the roof which would have offered cooler conditions for sleeping in the heat of the summer. The basic arrangement remains characteristic of Egyptian village houses today.
At the beginning of each ten-day shift, the workmen walked from the village, up the hillside, along the cliff-edge path and down into the Valley of the Kings. During the working week, they camped overnight in a sheltered col, close to their place of work. At the end of the shift, they retraced their steps home to be reunited with their families. Meanwhile, the women and children went about their daily business in their houses, in the village streets or at the marketplace. Over a period of some four centuries, successive generations of tomb workers and their families were born, lived and died at Deir el-Medina, until the Valley of the Kings was abandoned at the end of the New Kingdom and the village ceased to have a purpose.
In its heyday, during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties (1292–1069 BC), the community comprised about seventy families. It was a surprisingly cosmopolitan village, with workers of foreign descent from across the Egyptian empire. Life was
simple, but not impoverished. The tomb builders supplemented their income (doled out as government rations) by making pieces of funerary equipment for sale to private clients, exchanging them for household goods such as sandals, clothing and furniture. Some of the village women produced textiles which, again, could be exchanged for a profit. Although they owned no land, the villagers ate better than most of their compatriots. The village employed its own fishermen who supplied fresh and dried fish, as well as its own washerwomen who did the laundry down at the riverbank. Teams of donkeys brought daily water supplies. So, although cut off from the Nile, the community retained close links with Egypt’s life-giving river.
Unusually for ancient Egypt, many of Deir el-Medina’s inhabitants were literate, including some of the women, and they gave free expression to their thoughts—satirical and pious, serious and frivolous—in a wide range of writings. Occasionally these were done on papyrus, but more often on fragments of broken pottery or limestone flakes (known collectively by the Greek term ostraca) which lay all about the village. It is thanks to the survival of these documents that we know so much about the workers and their families—more, in fact, than we know about the kings for whom they toiled.
Unlike most of the artists and sculptors who produced the great works of ancient Egyptian art and architecture, the citizens of Deir el-Medina are known to us by name. And, from this distant past, some larger-than-life characters emerge. The most infamous, by far, was the foreman Paneb. He lived in the workers’ village towards the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and supervised the Right Side gang of tomb-builders. (Like the crew of a ship, the workers were divided into Right and Left sides.) In common with most of his fellow workers, Paneb had followed his father and grandfather into the tomb-building business. Paneb’s father, Nefersenet, had worked on the tomb of Ramesses II and was a well-known local figure. While the father had enjoyed respect, the son was to gain notoriety. Paneb shared his small village house with his wife Wabet, their three sons and five daughters; but in the cramped conditions of the village, living cheek-by-jowl with other households, the opportunity for extra-marital affairs was ever-present, and Paneb seems to have found the temptation irresistible. He had sexual relations with at least three married women, leading to tensions with both his own family and his neighbours.
In his professional dealings, too, Paneb was deceitful and unscrupulous. When a vacancy for foreman presented itself, Paneb simply bribed the vizier to ensure he got the job. Then, to cover his tracks, Paneb made a complaint against the vizier which led to his dismissal. Safely installed as foreman, Paneb systematically misappropriated state resources, taking his crew away from their contracted work in the Valley of the Kings to use them on the construction and decoration of his own tomb. He stole tools from his place of work, and was even accused of having plundered the royal tomb on which he himself had worked, robbing it of a chariot cover, incense, oil, wines and a statue. He compounded his offence of theft by sitting on the dead king’s sarcophagus, an act of terrible blasphemy. His detractors (of whom, by now, there were many) seized their chance to bring him to justice. The man who would have become foreman, but for Paneb’s machinations, dictated a series of charges to a scribe, then laid them in writing before the vizier. The defendant’s own son weighed in with accusations of adultery and fornication. Paneb was condemned on all sides, by colleagues and family members, and his criminal career had run its course. His ultimate fate is not known, but it would not be surprising if he managed to escape justice by some clever ruse. It would have been entirely in character.
The story of Paneb illustrates an important and obvious point: life in ancient Egypt had its darker side, despite the relentlessly positive image conveyed in official texts and images. The relationship between the populace and the state was not always the unquestioning, adoring obedience that the pharaohs would have had us believe. Sometimes, especially in circumstances of economic stress, the people made their voice heard. That the best-known example of civil disobedience from ancient Egypt, perhaps from the entire ancient world, involved the tomb workers of Deir el-Medina is no coincidence. This, after all, was a community more literate than most, better off than most, and, from the state’s perspective, more important than most, because of the highly sensitive and secret work on the king’s tomb. This special status gave the workers a combination of political clout and self-awareness that was rare, if not unparalleled, in the ancient world.
In the reign of Ramesses III (1187–1156 BC), the unwritten contract between the workers and their government paymasters broke down. Military conflict earlier in the reign had put a heavy economic burden on the state. As the king prepared for his jubilee, the government made the mistake of diverting scarce resources to the celebrations, instead of ensuring that its own employees were paid. The monthly wages of the tomb workers included their food rations, so late payment also meant going hungry. The workers did not hesitate to express their grievance, sending their foreman to remonstrate with local officials. This won a temporary victory, but merely papered over the cracks appearing in the edifice of the state.
The following year, the system of payment broke down entirely and the workers went on strike—the first recorded industrial dispute in history. Not only did they down tools, they also took part in demonstrations, marching en masse, chanting slogans, invading and occupying government buildings, setting up barricades at key installations: all the ingredients of a full-blown civil disturbance. The government seemed paralysed, unused to opposition of any kind, unable to react to such a well-articulated set of demands by so influential a group of people. In a desperate attempt to restore order, the Chief of Police was summoned to evict the protesters, but they refused to move. Eventually, with the workers’ flaming torches illuminating the night sky and a local dispute threatening to escalate into a national crisis, the authorities backed down and paid the strikers their overdue rations. But it was not the end of the affair. In total, the tomb workers went on strike four times, finally demanding not just the settlement of their particular grievance but wholesale reform of the government apparatus:
We have gone (on strike), not from hunger, but (because) we have a serious accusation to make: bad things have been done in this place of Pharaoh.3
This was a demand too far. But the tomb workers’ dispute had laid bare the sclerosis at the heart of the Egyptian state, a systemic failure that, in the end, proved its undoing. The tomb workers of Deir el-Medina may thus be credited with the very beginnings of civic awareness, of holding the government to account. The authorities’ response—denial followed by apathy, limited concessions accompanied by a security crackdown, disbelief and ultimately powerlessness—would be repeated many times in Egypt’s history, culminating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the early spring of 2011.
The showdown between the people of Deir el-Medina and the government has another modern parallel. Until the 1990s, there was still a small community on the west bank who made a living from the afterlife: not by building tombs but by plundering them. These spiritual heirs of Deir el-Medina lived in an equally close-knit, if ramshackle, village, a colourful collection of tumbledown, wood and mud-brick houses, nestled against the hillside of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. The village of Qurna, part of the landscape for centuries, was as much a feature of the Theban scenery as the honey-coloured ruins of the pharaohs. The families, most of whom had lived at Qurna for generations, knew the Theban necropolis better than any: it was, after all, their backyard. Many an archaeologist had cause to thank these local experts for pointing the way to new discoveries. And yet, the Qurnawis were also the embodiment of everything archaeology opposes: their houses were built on top of ancient tomb shafts, preventing proper study of the surrounding area; and when a family needed an injection of funds it was the work of moments to slip through a hole in the floor, enter a tomb, and extract a choice artefact (or a section of wall-painting) to sell on the antiquities market. The tombs’ guardians were thus also their plunderers. It was a situation that
the Mubarak regime, at the height of its power, was determined to end.
The government’s opening gambit was to try to persuade the villagers to leave, with the promise of modern houses in “New Qurna,” a few miles to the north. But the Qurnawis preferred their old wooden homes with treasure in the basement to new concrete homes with hot and cold running water and a flushing toilet. Like the tomb workers before them, they simply refused to budge. After all, they boasted of having been the last Egyptians to be conquered by Napoleon’s army, and a nineteenth-century traveller had described them as “superior to any other Arabs in cunning and deceit, and the most independent of any in Egypt.”4 When persuasion failed, the Egyptian government turned to force. Bulldozers arrived without notice to tear down the flimsy dwellings. The resulting scars on the landscape, as much as the plight of the villagers, brought the matter to the attention of tourists, some of whom expressed their support for the Qurnawis. This put the government in a dilemma: ostensibly, its clearance policy was designed to “restore” the Theban landscape to an imagined “pristine” condition for the edification of tourists. But, it soon transpired, many of those same tourists preferred a living landscape to an architecturally cleansed theme-park.
It was during the lull in evictions that I visited the house of the Hassans on the hillside of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. Theirs was a typical Qurnawi family. The older brother had left home to work in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, while a younger brother earned a modest living as a guide and selling trinkets to tourists in western Thebes. The mother and sisters spent their time, for the most part, in the back room of the house, doing the domestic chores, while the father received visitors in the front room—just as in ancient Deir el-Medina. The room was simply furnished but enjoyed the best view from a front door I have ever seen. From my perch on their upholstered settee (reserved for the most eminent visitors) I looked out over the necropolis of ancient Thebes, over the ruins of the Ramesseum, across the cultivated floodplain, to the Nile and, beyond, just visible through the haze, the columns of Luxor Temple: a World Heritage landscape framed by the wooden jambs of an old front door.
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