Tell el-Amarna. Deir el-Medineh

Tell el-Amarna. The city of Amarna was built on virgin soil and covered an area of about 13 x 5km (Figure 8). The city was made up of palaces, houses, and temples which had to be built quickly to accommodate the many thousands who were to move there from Thebes. A major royal road running north-south was built and it was flanked by palaces and temples. Some temples like the so-called House of the Sun Disk were up to 750 m long and 230 m wide.

Figure 8. Capital of Pharaoh Akhenaten at Tell el-Amarna (Eighteenth Dynasty)

They housed hundreds of altars for the offerings to Aten. Palaces were lavishly decorated and spread throughout the city. Private houses were located in the suburbs to the north and south of the Central City. Some larger houses or villas had more than forty rooms covering more than 1000 m². The standard design was tripartite with two public sections consisting of a vestibule, long hall and central hall.

The third section was the private area with bedrooms and bathrooms. Around these villas were clusters of smaller houses. Remarkably, the houses at Amarna differ in size rather than design, and most features were constantly repeated. By no means should Amarna be seen as an organic settlement however, since its standardization was mostly due to the time pressure of building the city.

Deir el-Medineh. The workmen’s village of Deir el-Medineh was founded under King Thutmosis I (c. 1504-1492 BC) in order to house the men who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings (Figure 9). It was a state-run community where almost all supplies for daily life were provided by the crown. At its peak the village consisted of some 70 houses alongside the main road and was surrounded by a 6-7 m high enclosure wall. Forty to fifty houses were built outside the compound.

Figure 9. Workmen’s village at Deir el-Medineh (New Kingdom)

An average house had four rooms with an entrance room 40-50 cm below street level. The original houses were complete mud-brick structures without foundations. Later houses had a basement of stones and sometimes stone walls extending up to 2.5 m in height. The major feature in the entrance area was the mud-brick bench-like structure, possibly a small shrine.

The next room had one or two columns and it contained a kind of divan. At the rear were the bedroom, the kitchen, and storage facilities. A staircase also gave access to the roof providing further living space. The inhabitants of Deir el-Medineh were buried in tombs on the hill slope nearby. The tombs had a superstructure with a chapel which was sometimes crowned by a small pyramid and a substructure with a shaft and a burial chamber that was often colorfully decorated.

Next to the village around 5000 limestone flakes and broken pottery sherds were found with many inscriptions from the villagers. They consist, among others, of contracts, files of lawsuits, prayers, and school texts. In conjunction with the archaeological evidence and other papyri concerning Deir el-Medineh, the settlement has become the best-known village of the Late Bronze Age. The village was abandoned under Ramses XI (c. 1099-1069 BC) when the Valley of the Kings was also abandoned as the royal burial ground.