Paper now published in The Theban Necropolis – Past, Present and Future, The British Museum Press, 2003

 

Modern Qurna – pieces of an historical jigsaw.

 

In Qurna it is almost always difficult to separate fact from fiction, myth from history, reality from unreality and magic. There is no archaeological record of the last thirteen hundred years or so, and no consistent written records either.  It seems generally agreed that the history of rural and village Egypt and that of the fellahiin are the least studied subjects in the many millenia of this essentially rural, village and peasant country.  However, at least in Qurna we can start to piece a history together from what is known about the general area south of Qus and Qena, the evidence on the ground and fragments that have been recorded as a by product.

 

To understand the habitation patterns we must try to see the area as post pharaonic residents saw it.  There is the Qurn itself, the holy mountain, the natural pyramid, and the range of hills of which it is a part.  There is the wide, fertile plain, beginning sharply where the wady from Kings’ Valley enters the Nile - here the inundation covers the agricultural land and laps against the base of huge ruins of stone and mud brick buildings of an almost totally forgotten past - buildings full of spirits and building materials.  Then there are other large mud brick groups of buildings with rooms, courtyards and even towers, some on the earlier religious sites and some on the heights of the sacred hills.  In the rocky shale of the land north and west of the plain there are numerous caverns that make extensive and convenient homes.  Approaching from the river, the long rows of doors of many of the subterranean dwellings in Tarif are some of the most noticeable features of the whole west bank landscape.  On the sides of the hills and further in the wadis there are yet more caves - convenient for long term storage or short term emergencies. These include natural emergencies such as a high inundation or flash flood, and the more common, human, ones when the authorities come for taxes or take young men for the army and for forced labour or the marauding Bedouin come from the mountains looting and stealing.

 

It has been generally stated that the West Bank here was deserted for some centuries, but there is no reason to suppose that this area was ever devoid of habitation, despite the small population of Egypt of about three million from the 7th to the 15th century.  Indeed there are good arguments to be made for continuous occupation with original populations joined by Arab, Bedouin and some Berber families and some people from the balad es Sudan.  There is an abundance of easily made or acquired dwellings and the excellent agricultural land.  In addition it was a place with deep religious significance and strong magic.

 

The original mud-brick village of Qurna was in and around Seti 1, (Plate1) on the edge of their fields, but where they could see both to the sacred sites around, and down the river to watch constantly for trouble coming.  The village is recorded on this site by all the earliest European travellers from the late 17th century onwards. (Pococke 1743, p.97. Bruce 1790, p.120)  Also recorded by everyone is the constant Qurnawi fear of the authorities.

 

Lepsius writes, “…. the old village of Qurna was grouped around a Coptic church at this spot, and was principally situated in the interior of the great outer courts of the temple.” This was written in 1845 but describes a Qurna long gone.  It is highly likely that Lepsius got his information from Sheikh Awad (c.1773-c.1868), the famous Qurnawi guide and local historian.  The Coptic church – otherwise unknown – has been excavated recently by the German Institute.  By 1801-2, when William Hamilton visited Thebes, (Hamilton 1809, p.133) he saw, “…. ruins of a considerable town around the temple of El-Ebak (Seti 1).”  Qurna village was deserted and he tells us that the cause was the encroachment of water, but he was there during the inundation and the desertion might have been temporary.

 

Robert Richardson, travelling with Lord and Lady Belmont and party, wrote in 1817, “The village stands in a grove of palm trees, where the cultivated soil joins the rocky flat, ....  It consists of a number of houses of unburnt brick, generally small, but some of them, much larger, are of superior workmanship to the average of ruined houses in this country.  At the time of our visit, it was quite uninhabited.  The natives had abandoned it and retired to the caves in the adjoining rocky flat; because, from the low situation, and the fillings up of the canals, the village is liable to be overflowed during the time of the inundation.  However, when the river subsides, and the ground becomes dry, they quit their rocky tenements and return to their mansions of clay, which are more conveniently situated for water, grazing and agriculture.”  (Richardson 1822 Vol. 2 p.8)

 

At the time of Edward William Lane’s precise records of 1827 it was also deserted, (Add MSS 34081:233-270) the families having moved to the hillside tombs where the new work and recently appreciated antique ‘rubbish’ was. Except for a very few tombs which were used as long term, secret deposit accounts, where the head of the house would go once a year or so to retrieve one piece of gold or silver, (Bonomi 1830 note 8) those tombs that were open had long ago lost any article of intrinsic worth.  The items left had no value until foreign collectors gave them value, and once that happened it was in the Qurnawi interest to stake their claims and move house.

 

Lane drew a detailed map of the area which included the site of the village. (Plate 2) His description of going to Seti 1 from the river can be followed on the map: “The track is hemmed in on each side by a low wall built to protect the crops from the cattle which occasionally pass this way.  On entering the desert tract beyond (which is of a dazzling whiteness, and covered with small fragments of stone), we have before us the ruined village partly surrounding an ancient edifice: on our left are several enclosures of low walls, containing palm trees: on our right is a modern burial place, with some tombs of sheikhs.” (Lane Add MSS 34081:236-8)

 

In a drawing by Robert Hay (Plate 3) we see the inundation reaching to the deserted village, on the left are the walls of Ginena, (the Arabic word for garden) with its palm groves. Most of the original village families now living in the Nobles Tombs area own palm trees in Ginena.  It is a remaining link between the families who relocated for economic reasons in the early 19th century and their former home.

 

The Qurnawi could and still can relocate very fast if they wish - everything can be packed on a donkey or a camel and you can move house in a few hours.  Thus it is impossible to know when this desertion happened, and whether seasonal, temporary or relatively permanent. By the 1850s it is clear that there are people living here again, and we have tales of Qurnawi families giving hospitality to visitors. (Bell 1888:120-123)

 

Francis Frith photographed here in the 1850s and there are some remarkable stereoscopic photographs in a book for which Joseph Bonomi wrote the text.  (Frith 1862 Plates IX and X) One pair of photographs shows a typical simple house that could be anywhere, and then the next pair, taken from a slightly different angle, puts it in its location just east of Seti 1.  (Plate 4) It is clear from the mat put out to dry on the low wall, and the general domestic clobber, that there are people living once more on the site of the old village.

 

The temple and courtyards were cleared in the 1920s, and there have been extensive excavations for decades.  The floods of 1994 destroyed many of the houses to the east of the temple, and there was a further clearance of houses to the south of the temple a few years ago.  We may have lost the chance to investigate the history and archaeology of Qurna village in that area.

 

We now associate with the place-name Qurna with the hillside hamlets, but this is misleading.  Qurna is an administrative district name for an area which stretches from the Colossi on the south to beyond Tarif on the north.  Tarif, with its huge tombs, is now covered in houses and seldom visited - the Necropolis here is no longer seen.  It was a very different matter two hundred years ago.  18th and 19th century writers record that there was also a sizeable population living in the tombs in Tarif, (Richardson 1822 Vol. 2:74, Webster 1830 Vol.2:168) and this population was referred to as a general part of the dwellers on the Theban Necropolis.  One mention by Bonomi (Bonomi 1830 note 77) together with very worn note on a fragment of manuscript map by Francis Catherwood (Add MSS 29816:1) are the only instances so far found of the name Tarif used to distinguish this northern necropolis area.  These tomb dwellings were described and drawn by a number of visitors, although they have often been wrongly attributed, possibly because of amalgamated copies by lithographers. The main three sided, multi-doored range in Vivant Denon’s drawing of the Theban Necropolis (Plate 5) is clearly Saff el Dawaba, Saff el Kisasija, or another of the Saff tombs in Tarif.  Though the background looks more like the Nobles Tombs area, it is not a drawing of the Nobles Tombs on Sheikh abd el Qurna.   He describes going to the North of the wady road, and it is in this area he meets his most hostile reception.  We must remember when reading stories of the hostility of the Qurnawi that any non-local on horseback, probably dressed à la Turque, would automatically be seen as a threat. (Rodenbeck 1997)

 

Writing about Qurna in the 1840s, Mrs Romer described an area which must be Tarif, “The entrances to these sepulchral chambers very much resemble the catacombs of the new cemetery of Kensal Green, and I should imagine that the mummies must have been disposed in the same manner that the coffins are placed there.  But not a single mummy is now forthcoming, the living having succeeded to the dead, and Arab villages are established in the burial vaults of the old Thebans.” (Romer 1846 Vol. 1:312)

 

Pococke in 1737 (Pococke 1743:97) and Sonnini in the late 1770s, (Sonnini 1800 pp.650-64) amongst others, had letters of introduction to the Sheikh of Qurna, who they record living in the village by Seti 1.  Sonnini stayed the night in “one of the most unsubstantial of the cottages”.  He spent a disturbed night due to the rats and the strong winds which blew one of the walls down.    Many writers report that the Sheikh tells stories of hostility between the people of Qurna and those of the next village, that of Beyrat, a hostility or rivalry that still exists today. The Sheikh is also in fear of people who live in the tombs on the hillsides.  In the 18th century there were people living in some of the Dra abu’l Naga tombs, almost certainly settled or semi-settled Bedouin. (Bonomi 1830 note 66)  It is possible that a very few people already lived in tombs in the Sheikh abd el Qurna area, while settlement on Qurnet Marei appears to be the most recent.

 

In addition to the main Coptic monastery ruins which, because of their locations appear not to have been inhabited, the Hay drawings of the 1820s clearly show a number of other ancient structures in use which are probably Coptic - in particular one on the south east slope of Sheikh abd el Qurna, which has large courtyards and at least one tomb entrance in the back wall, said to have Christian graffiti. (Plate 6)  In the Bibliotèque Nationale de France there is a wonderful view of 1827, painted by Wilkinson, looking down into the busy family compound.  (le coteVh 176 res Fol. page 85)  It is also clear on a photo by Maxime du Camp of the early 1850s.   (du Camp 1852 Vol.2 pl.60)     By the late 19th century it had been rebuilt, but the complex stood on more or less the same footprint. (Plate I)  It was the home of a Copt, Todros Ayoub, when Baraize did his surveys in the early 20th century, (Baraize 1904 sheet 32) and indeed the whole area here, and that stretching at the same level around the hillside, was until very recently a Coptic area.   A range of buildings was bought in the 1970s or 80s by the Abd er Salaam family and the Todros house is now part of Snake’s ‘Sennefer Coffee Shop’

 

By the 1820s there was a relatively large population living in the hillside tombs, (Lane Ad MSS 34081:242, Belzoni 1821:158) those in the Nobles Tombs area having mainly relocated from Qurna village. They lived in the tombs themselves and on the ledges and courts in front. (Plate 7)  They made a wide range of ‘furniture’ from the fibre-glass like fermented mud and dung mixture used for thousands of years.  They farmed, kept a wide variety of domestic animals, and the men and boys were employed by the foreign collectors and excavators.  Increasingly they also provided for the growing tourist trade by making souvenirs, acting as guides and donkey boys, and generally offering local knowledge and hospitality.

 

In 1830 Joseph Bonomi recorded that ‘the number of cultivators in the village of Gurna who pay the land tax is 224, and perhaps the whole number of men may be 330, to which add 350 women and about 350 children and that may be a tolerably fair calculation of the present inhabitants.’ (Bonomi 1830 MSS N-R coll.)  That would give a population of just over one thousand, which is quite probable, but it is impossible to judge whether Bonomi was referring to people living on the hillside, or those in the whole west bank administrative district of Qurna, which would have included Tarif as it still does.  Yanni says that some years before he arrived – therefore in the early 19th century, there had been eighteen hundred houses, reduced to two hundred and sixteen by ‘the war of extermination that the mamelukes waged against them’. (d’Athanasi 1836:131)  Once more it is impossible to know what area he is talking about and what he means by the word ‘house’. 

 

Over time the tomb dwellers built walls outside the tombs, and then complete buildings around and on top of their tombs.  But many continued to live very simply until now.  A late 19th century post card shows a range of dwellings on the south east of the Asasif. (Plate II)  They were vacated by their Coptic residents some four years ago, and a close examination of the stratigraphy on the vertical surface at the back  (Plate III) will show how little damage such occupation made over one hundred years, despite goats, children and everything.   Much of it is stone for stone the same.

 

Giovanni Belzoni started an anti-Qurnawi story, believed and much quoted even now by reputable scholars, when he said that they were irreligious and had no mosque. (Belzoni 1821:159)  The early mosque with its wells is clearly shown on maps by Lane (Plate 2) and Wilkinson. (Wilkinson 1831 map 4)  Wilkinson shows it as one large space with two side rooms - one informant says it was domed. It was so old that by the early 20th century it was already a ruin, (Survey of Egypt 1924 sheet D7) but remained a place of worship and prayer, and a new mosque was built on the site a few years ago.  The mosques of Hasasna and Atiyat were late 19th and early 20th and that of Horubat is mid 20th.   Wilkinson states on his map that the shrine in the hollow just to the west of Seti 1 was the tomb of the Sheikh who led the rebellion of 1824, but some informants say it is a tomb of the local Sufi Sheikh abd er Rahman, and others that it is not a tomb shrine at all but a place of prayer for a national cult.  This is yet another of Qurna’s little mysteries which would be solved by further work with or by an Arabic speaker.

 

Perhaps a reason why Belzoni didn’t see the mosque was because it did not look like one, it had no minaret and was small and easy to overlook.  Until two years ago the mosque of Omda Jabr near Seti 1 was just a simple place of prayer and meeting.  However, the strengthening of this local cult by its recent association with a charismatic young sheikh from Zagazig has led to the building of a striking new mosque as a rival to that of Sheikh Tayib just along the road.  There are a number of small prayer stops throughout Qurna, visible only because of a few mats and perhaps some low walls. There are also many zawia, such as the distinctive ruined building on the edge of el Hoha. (Plate IV)  Some of these look ancient, but this is probably deceptive.  What is certain is that the religious as well as the social significance of the zawia of Qurna need record and study.   A zawia is a building belonging to a family, which serves as chapel, guest-house, meeting and function room; they often also have Sufi connections.

 

The Robert Hay drawings of the cemetery (Hay Add MS 29816: 83/4/5) show four old sheikh tombs, three of which still stand. (Plate 9)  Clearly the cemetery is already large and old.   One of the Sheikh tombs looks to be of Fatimid date and there is a curious structure that appears to be a mud-brick minbar.  The history of the cults of the local shrines (Plate V) is also complicated, part history and part myth, but an investigation by a knowledgeable Arabic speaker, and an Islamic architecture specialist could add immensely to the Qurna history. 

 

By Wilkinson’s time there were at least seven wells in Qurna south of the cemetery, and at the start of the 20th century there were at least ten, most of which still exist.    Plate 10 shows the saqieh by the pylon of the Ramesseum in 1924 - history has it that this well was also used to dispose of the foreskins from male circumcisions.  (Hay Add MS 31054:141)  It must have been a most magical well.

 

In the 1820s some of the Europeans working permanently in Qurna built houses for themselves and their families, friends and visitors.  British consul general Henry Salt built one for his man on the spot Giovanni d’Athanasi, known as Yanni, which was probably the first actual new building on the hillside since the 8th century.  It became the residence and meeting place for many of the professional collectors, antiquarians, draughtsmen and visitors.  Best known in the drawing from a photo taken in 1855, (Plate VI) this view shows Yanni’s house like a small castle surrounded by courtyards. (Rhind 1862:79)  Wilkinson’s house with its towers is higher up the hill, and below Yanni is the tomb house of Sheikh Osman with its mud structures.  Hay’s panoramic drawing of thirty years before shows the range of one and two storey buildings with the imposing courtyard walls.  It appears to be one of the few houses on the hillside without a tomb underneath - as Yanni had the pick of all tombs and temples and had no need for a personal one.

 

There are many descriptions of life in the house with the pet gazelle, and accounts of scenes  viewed from the windows, including the major Arab rebellion of 1824. (Madox 1834 Vol. 1:428-Vol.2:32)  Madox writes of Yanni’s house, “Here, mounting a staircase, and passing over a platform, or small enclosed square, in which were three or four pretty little gazelles running about, I ascended another flight of steps and entered a tolerably decent-looking room, though horribly dark.”  (Madox 1834 Vol. 1:276)  Yanni lived there with his mother and wife.   Madox says that a month or so later Yanni “had built another mud room, which enabled him to give one up to me.” (ibid., 389)  Then, as now, it only took days to transform a building, enlarge or contract, build another storey or another room or enclose another yard.  Large buildings can appear in a few weeks, and there are stories in Qurna of them even appearing over-night.

 

Hoskins stayed at Yanni’s 1832-3, and describes its good and bad points, “Beside accommodation for cooking and for my servants, I had two good rooms.  One of them served as a sleeping and at the same time store-room: but this combination had its inconveniences, as it attracted around my bed swarms of rats with which almost every house in Egypt is infested.”  He had simple furniture,  “and mats on the floor that could be watered daily.  Compared to the other habitations in the village, my house was a little palace.”  (Hoskins 1837:3)

 

At the start of the 20th century (Baraize map 32) the house was owned by the Lazim family - the same family as the earlier Sheikh Osman.  Today it is very ruinous, and lived in by an elderly Hajja and her goats.(Plate VII)   It is likely that one of the first ‘modern’ buildings, which made a considerable contribution to the built history of the area, will disappear with no records. 

 

Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s tomb house is well known, (Thompson 1996:53-59) and appears in a number of sketches of 1828 by Nestor l’Hôte held in the Louvre. Wilkinson’s own sketches a year earlier give the feel of living there, (Plate 11) with a highly unusual mud structure – a larder perhaps  - covering one of the tomb entrances and a classical jardinière.  The house of the Italian collector Piccinini, in Dra abu’l Naga, was small and stuffed with antiquities. (Plate 12)  It was probably the first actual house on Dra abu’l Naga but he had many tomb-dwelling neighbours.

 

James St John, living on Sheikh abd el Qurna in 1834, tells a story that one night, looking over the valley in the heat, he met an old Dervish and they sat and smoked and chatted.  The Dervish had returned to Qurna after long religious wanderings and “built himself a humble residence, with an oratory attached, and close to the latter, a large apartment in which he collected together the children of the neighbourhood, that he might teach them to read and write and initiate them in the truths of religion.  He made no difference between the sexes, but taught equally girls and boys.”  (St John 1853 Vol.2:147-51) 

 

St John may or may not have actually met his Dervish, but the man is there in the oral history.

The Dervish was called Abd er Rahman and he started the first kuttab, or Koranic village school, in Qurna. The area now around the Rifai family house all belonged to Sheikh Abd er Rahman.  Hajja Rifai took me into the zawia that was the school.  Outside there is a small square, mud brick structure with a small door which she did not tell me about.  But another local Hajj who trusted me more says this is the library of Abd er Rahman and is never opened.  It is a venerated place.  Osman Taia Daramali, now 76 and living just below Yanni’s house, says that Abd er Rahman arrived in Qurna after a period when there had not been a Sheikh and he taught them to understand prayer.  He was probably a Sufi who returned in the late 18th century, but it might have been earlier, bringing his Koranic learning and ‘organised mysticism’ (Berkey 1998:406-8) to an illiterate Arabic speaking rural community, mixed in origin, many still with Coptic and indeed pagan beliefs and customs.

 

Many of the houses and extended family house groups are worthy of detailed record and study, but here we will only look at some oddities. Most houses have flat roofs and ceilings using massive timbers, but a few have rooms with a series of mud brick arches, so that the house uses no timber. These vaulted ceilings are used on sites where the wood-eating ants would destroy the timbers. This house in Suallim, west of Seti 1, is a good example. (Plate IX)  Built about 40 years ago, the ground floor rooms have arched ceilings - and naturally it has the usual handy pre-existing cellar. The area of Suallim was settled late, as people feared the number of jinns that resided here – it gets particularly bad dust storms and was pock-marked with mummy pits.

 

Most houses have square corners, but some follow the contours, like the one shown here (Plate X) high above Sheikh Tayib’s house in Hasasna, which hugs the hillside and has a long curved outer wall that creates beautiful internal spaces.  This house also has its obligatory tombs.   There are still dwellings on the hillside that are just low walls outside tombs, where construction materials and techniques are quite varied: the walls incorporating broken water pots, lines of stones, re-used ancient mud-brick and other recycled objects.  Above the houses in Atiyat (the north of Dra abu’l Naga) there is a tomb that only shows as a slim hole in the shale, with no exterior signs of habitation, which was lived in until about eight years ago. 

 

The mud things, menama, sowama and others, so much a feature here as in other parts of Upper Egypt, are the most environmentally sustainable furniture and a sculpture gallery waiting to be appreciated. (Plate XI) Herbert Winlock and Somers Clark seem to be the only archaeologists who took a professional interest in these. (Winlock 1936:51)  They are remarkable, whether stand alone, attached to the walls of tombs or incorporated into the structure of buildings.  Dr Salima Ikram has studied some of them in Sohag, but in Qurna they are disappearing without record.

 

The lack of any adequate record of post pharaonic features is nothing new.  The huge ruin, here sketched by Wilkinson (Plate 14), was part of Deir el Bakhit, on the top of Dra abu’l Naga.  At a rough glance it looks five storeys high, but was probably three, and reminds one of ruined Cistercian monasteries. There is no way that the hundreds of early visitors could have missed it, but they didn’t record it because they didn’t care.  This is the only drawing so far found of it, and there is a very faint sketch and some scrappy descriptions of window details in a diary of Robert Hay. (Hay Add MS 29824:23)  What a shame it is that this, and Deir el Bahari were never properly recorded.  It is good news indeed that the German Institute have plans to excavate Deir el Bakhit at last.

 

Another subject worthy of further study is local labour relations, examples of which creep in to excavation reports and diaries.  The attitude of foreign employers to their local Qurnawi labour force, is a fascinating, murky and political subject. (Plate 15) This set of mug-shots by Schaiparelli, in his report on excavations in the Valley of the Queens is a typical, if extreme, example - natives presented as criminal specimens.

 

Poor treatment of the local population continues.  (Plate 16) A leaflet was part of the consultation exercise for the planned relocation of Qurna in the mid 1990s.  It shows the new village sensitively planned, with respect for local social structures and needs. This was what many local people agreed to and they keep these leaflets locked safely in their cupboards to prove it.  What they have been given so far is barrack-type accommodation in the desert, bearing no resemblance to anything agreed.  More new land has being prepared to the west of Tarif, but the Qurnawi will need more than the good luck invoked by the paint handprints now seen on many of the construction vehicles.  People have lived and worked on the Theban Hills for many millennia, but despite UNESCO guidelines on respecting communities in World Heritage Sites, and a seismic shift in the opinion of many of the archaeologists there, the living and working communities are sadly still not being included in official plans for their future.

 

 

Caroline Simpson July 2000

British Museum, Theban Necropolis Colloquium 2000.

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End.