El-Qurna: Exploring Luxor's 3,500-year-old Cemetery that was also Home to the Living | Current World Archaeology

El-Qurna before the removal of the village.
Photo: Bernard Gagnon CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sheikh Abd el-Qurna on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor is a huge necropolis that dates back at least three millennia, perhaps further, to the earliest burials of the ancient elite of Thebes. It was also home to the living, as attested by the recently demolished jumble of hamlets that were once strewn atop the tombs.

Now the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) is working to understand both the ancient and the modern history of el-Qurna, a project that involves the local community and, as a result, is creating much-needed employment in the area following the collapse of the tourism industry. Since October 2012, the Qurna Site Improvement (QSI) project, managed by ARCE, is recording the remains of the hamlets that once stood on the Theban foothills.

The major impetus behind this fieldwork is the manual clearance of debris left over from the demolition of the hamlets of el-Qurna and el-Khokha, which were built across and on top of the site’s ancient tombs; both hamlets were destroyed as part of a countrywide policy of removing modern buildings from archaeological sites between 2007 and 2010. Though now largely lost, these mud-brick houses are as much a part of the site’s history as the ancient burials, especially as their architecture had, over time, become inextricably fused with the tombs.

This article was originally published in Current World Archaeology 65 (2014).To read the full article as pdf, follow the link: El-Qurna: Exploring Luxor's 3,500-year-old Cemetery that was also Home to the Living.