Les Hommes oubliés de la vallée des Rois

In Upper Egypt, at Deir el-Medina near Luxor, the traces of a village of 68 houses are hidden in the hollow of a gorge, unseen from the road leading to the gates of the Valley of the Kings... Despite their appearance, these ruins are of exceptional importance. They represent the rarest kind of vestiges of an Egyptian community at the time of the Pharaohs. Direct testimony of the ordinary life of Egyptians in the New Empire period.
Kha, Sennedjem, Pached, Nakhtamon, Inerkhaoui, Amenakht, all these unknown figures lived here with their families, over 3000 years ago. They were called "the Servants of the Square of Truth". They were the quarrymen, the plasterers, the draughtsmen, the sculptors, and the painters of the Tomb of Pharaoh over a period of some five centuries. Forming a privileged corporation, they constituted a community whose members had virtually hereditary functions. All the underground monuments of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens were their handiwork, an extraordinary achievement that no visitor was intented ever to have seen...
At Deir el-Medina, their homes are abandoned. The objects that recall their lives have been scattered throughout the world. Today, they are to be found at the Louvre museum, in Cairo, or at the Egyptian Museum in Turin.
Everything has disappeared. But their spirit still remains alive, beneath the sand