Qurna Nobles’ Tombs

Journal entry for Thursday 12 March 1998

After a morning in Luxor doing a little shopping, Robin and I crossed back to the West Bank and decided to visit Qurna where the Theban elite had their tombs. These tomb chapels of the noblemen are very different to the royal tombs in the King’s Valley and made a nice contrast. To begin with they are very much smaller than the kings’ tombs, but they are also more lively, often with bright paintings which represent the daily life of the deceased and their families as well as the funerary rites. We got a service taxi to Qurna, first stopping at the ticket office to buy a ticket for the tombs of Benia, Khonsu and Userhet, which are grouped together in the same location.

The T-shaped tomb of Benia (TT343), who is also called Pahekmen, is situated in a courtyard in the village of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. He had several titles, including ‘Overseer of Works’ and his tomb contains depictions of Benia supervising the weighing of gold and precious items from the treasury, which are then recorded by scribes. It is likely that Benia was brought to Egypt as a child from an Asiatic land (because of his name and the names of his parents), to be brought up in the royal court. This was often the custom during the New Kingdom. There are some lovely banqueting scenes showing Benia and his relatives being entertained by male musicians, including a harpist, which is especially beautiful. The long inner chamber has scenes of the funeral procession on the left-hand side, in which Benia’s sarcophagus with the accompanying burial goods is dragged to his tomb. The procession moves towards the Western Goddess and scenes below show boats in the ‘Abydos Pilgrimage’. On the opposite side the funeral rites are shown, with the ‘Opening of the Mouth’ ritual before the mummy and offerings for the deceased. At the rear of the inner chamber is a statue niche which contains well-preserved painted limestone seated statues of Benia with his parents (his father Irtonena and his mother Tirukak) on either side.

Next, to the nearby tomb of Khonsu (TT32). Also called To, Khonsu was a priest of the funerary cult of Tuthmose III during the reign of Rameses II and had the title ”First Prophet of Menkheperre’. His tomb has many lovely paintings depicting the cult of the god Montu as well as that of Tuthmose III. One of the most interesting scenes in this tomb details the Festival of Montu, with some of Khonsu’s relatives making offerings to Montu’s barque in a procession of boats heading to the Montu Temple at Armant. There are also some  beautiful painted ceilings depicting birds and ducks flying, a grape arbour and some lovely bright geometric textile-type designs.

There are two nobles tombs at Qurna with the name of Userhet and the one we next went into was TT51. This Userhet bore the title ‘First Prophet of the Royal Ka of Tuthmose I’ during the reign of Seti I. His tomb is close to that of Khonsu and shows fine detailed paintings of the rituals concerning the mortuary cult of Tuthmose I. On the left side of the entrance to the transverse hall there are funerary scenes which show Userhet being led by Anubis to the underworld and a judgement scene in which his heart is weighed against a feather. The deceased is shown kneeling before Osiris and Hathor (as the ‘Goddess of the West’) and kneeling before the ‘Souls of Pe and Nekhen’. The funeral procession depicts the rites performed before mummies and a pyramid tomb. There are also scenes from a procession during the Festival of Tuthmose I, including men bringing gifts or supplies and Userhet adoring the royal barque. Another wall shows Userhet with his wife Hatshepsut (also called Shepset) and his mother Tawosret in a beautiful scene depicting the goddess of the sycamore tree (Hathor or Mut). The Abydos Pilgrimage is portrayed below. There are also scenes of Userhet kneeling before the gods – Thoth presents him to Osiris and Anubis and then he appears before an offering table. Priests are being purified before worshipping Montu and Meretseger, ‘Goddess of the Theban Necropolis’. Another larger undecorated chamber contains four square pillars with the burial shaft in the far corner, but this was closed to visitors.

They were all lovely tombs, but all the walls were covered with protective glass, which made it much more difficult to photograph. By the time we had finished it was late afternoon, so we caught an arabeya back to the ticket office and from there walked along the track to Medinet Habu. Robin and I decided to carry on walking in the cool of the evening and headed a little way out into the desert towards Malqata to watch the sun going down behind the mountain. Nobody took any notice or tried to stop us so we walked quite a way out over the dusty sand. The thing that always strikes me about the desert, even just a little way out, is the silence, the feeling of vast spaces and the knowledge that if we carried on (several hundreds of kilometres) we would reach the Lybian border! But we didn’t go too far. As it began to get quite dark we turned back to have dinner at the Rameses Cafeteria at Habu.

To the West Bank

Wednesday 20 December 1995

This morning there were a group of musicians playing outside our hotel. They wore colourful galabeyas and turbans and played a variety of instruments including several types of drum and tabla and a rababa. The rababa is a curious instrument consisting of half a coconut shell covered in goatskin (traditionally) with a long vertical pole with pegs at the top which keep its two strings taut. It is played like a violin with a bow and is also known as the ‘Fiddle of the Nile‘. To our western ears the discordant screeching noise it made was terrible! I loved the drums though and that wonderful Saidi rhythm. I chatted to the musicians for a while, whose ages ranged from around twelve to eighty, and learned about their instruments, even having a try at playing the rababa. Hmm, It wasn’t as easy as it looked. I could have listened to the insistant drumbeat, and the alternate drone and melody of the rababa all day. It was so different to any music I’d heard before and seemed to come up from the ground through my feet making me want to dance.

But I had other things to do. My friend and I were going to make our first solo foray over to the West Bank. Although there was a special ferry for tourists, we decided to cross the river on the local ferry, a listing, rusty metal hulk which seemed to contain half the population of Luxor. On the way we met a taxi driver called Sharif, who we had spoken to before. His taxi was in Luxor, but he said his father had one on the other side and if we went with him to his parents house he would ask his father to  take us to the tombs. This we did, but the whole procedure took much longer than we thought as we were invited by Mother to have a cup of tea in the shaded garden courtyard while Sharif went off to look for Father. Small brothers and sisters stood and silently gazed at us with huge liquid eyes while we tried to make conversation in sign language. Sharif’s father Ahmed was duly found and we eventually set off in his taxi. We were heading for the Nobles tombs out towards the mountains after buying our tickets at the ticket office, which at that time was near the river.

The village of Qurna was nestled in the foothills of the Theban mountains and hidden among (and under) the primitive houses are over 400 ancient tombs and tomb chapels belonging to the local elite. The first we saw, and which I will always think of as one of the most beautiful of the Theban tombs was that of Sennefer, ‘Mayor of the Southern City’ of Thebes and an important official during the reign of Amenhotep II. His tomb, high up on the hillside, is known as the ‘Tomb of the Vines’ because of the beautiful decoration on some of the ceilings which gave me the impression of standing under an tent hung with big bunches of grapes. Its two chambers were deep underground and the paintings of Sennefer, his wife and his sister were very colourful and well-preserved. For a little baksheesh, the guard allowed us to take photographs.

The owner of the next tomb was Rekhmire who was a ‘Governor of the Town’ and ‘Vizier’ during the reigns of Tuthmose III and Amenhotep II. In a long high passageway  there were many scenes of industries and craftsmen and in the outer chamber pictures of animals – panthers, giraffes, elephants and horses brought from Nubia. The following tomb. belonged to Khaemhet, who was a royal scribe and ‘Overseer of the Granaries’ during the reign of Amenhotep III. This was not so colourful but had beautifully carved reliefs of agricultural scenes as well as funerary scenes.

In our fourth tomb, that of Userehet, another royal scribe, we saw more agricultural scenes, this time painted rather than carved. The guards here were very good to us, though they spoke no English. They lit the walls of the tomb with a series of shiny metal sheets used as mirrors to reflect sunlight onto the walls (not very archaeologically sound as I later came to realise). Anyway, it worked very well and we were able to take photographs in even the darkest corners of the tomb. I loved the scenes of daily life found in these tombs much more than the formal afterlife scenes in the Valley of the Kings.

Our last call was to the tomb of Ramose, ‘Governor of Thebes’ during the reign of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. This was his tomb-chapel and was much larger and grander than the previous four. The reliefs on the walls were (and still are) in my opinion the most beautiful in the whole of Egypt. After we had a good look around the guard took us down into the burial chamber, which involved an adventurous slide down a steep narrow tunnel on our bottoms. The chamber was roughly hewn from the rock and completely empty and undecorated, but worth the undignified descent just to see the glittering alabaster ceiling. By the time we emerged to see the curious faces of another party of visitors my friend and I were both filthy and dishevelled. Strangely we both felt much more comfortable in these nobles tombs than we had in the tombs of the pharaohs. There was a much more personal atmosphere here – I could imagine the lives of the owners and their families much more easily than the remote lives of the kings. Or perhaps it was because we hardly saw any other tourists and were able to spend as long as we wanted in the tombs admiring the ancient craftsmanship.

Finally we asked Ahmed to take us to the Ramesseum, the temple built for Rameses the Great, but unfortunately the monument was closed for restoration. Instead he took us to Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Rameses III. The paintings here were fabulous, with so much colour compared to all the other temples I had seen. I was very surprised it was not more of a major site, being second only to Karnak Temple in size. At that time hardly anyone went to visit it. I was so glad we had come here as it became in the following years my favourite place in Egypt.