Deir el-Medina

Deir el-Medina is where the people who built the royal tombs actually lived. Tucked into a small valley on the West Bank between the Valley of the Queens and the Theban hills, it was home to the artisans who cut and decorated the tombs in the Valley of the Kings from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty, roughly 1550 to 1080 BC. In ancient times the village was called Set Maat, the Place of Truth, and its workers were known as the Servants in the Place of Truth.

What survives today is the outline of the village itself, with the stone footings of houses laid out along a central street, and the cemetery on the hillside above. The workers used their skills on their own tombs, and the small painted burial chambers here are among the most charming on the West Bank, with bright, intimate scenes of family life, farming and the journey to the afterlife. Which tombs are open varies, and some may need a separate ticket.

The village has given historians an unusually detailed picture of everyday life. Around five thousand ostraca, inscribed flakes of pottery and limestone, were found in a well nearby, recording everything from commercial transactions to literary texts, and they reveal working conditions, family matters and disputes. Excavations were led by Ernesto Schiaparelli from 1905 to 1909, and then by a French team under Bernard Bruyère, who excavated the whole site between 1922 and 1951.

At the northern end stands a small temple to Hathor built under the Ptolemies on the site of an older shrine. In the Christian era it became a monastery.

Allow about an hour. The site is usually quiet, and the scale is human, which makes it a good choice for families and for anyone who has had enough of crowds. Some tombs are reached by steep steps or ladders. Deir el-Medina is a few minutes' drive from Medinet Habu, the Valley of the Queens and the Ramesseum, so it slots easily into a West Bank day. After the grand royal tombs, the modest scale of the workers' own burials is a welcome change, and the details of family life painted on their walls tend to stay with visitors.