The Hermitage of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

On the southern side of the so-called Third Valley (also known as the Valley of the Last Mentuhotep), high on the slopes of an unnamed hill, behind Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, an unfinished mortuary complex of Amenemhat Sehetepibre is located. It includes two tombs, TT 1151 and TT 1152, which were occupied by two Christian hermits, in the last decades of the fifth century. The tombs were used by subsequent generations of monks, until their eventual abandonment in the eighth century. It is demonstrated that Tomb TT 1152 was prepared for one of the court officials of the Middle Kingdom in Thebes and it is dated to the end of the Eleventh or the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty. Whereas it was never finished, certain parts of its interior, such as the entrance corridor and the cult chapel were completed. It was repetitively used for sepulchral purposes between the Second Intermediate Period and the beginning of the Late Period. In front of the entrance to the tomb there was an open courtyard, which would have been normally surrounded by a mud-brick wall; however, this wall was never built. In the centre of the rock facade there was the entrance to the tomb leading to a long rock-cut corridor with a square chamber at the end – the funerary cult chapel. In the floor of this chamber, there was an entrance to a deep shaft. Usually, at the bottom of this shaft, there was another corridor leading to the burial chamber. In TT 1152, the burial chamber was never hewn, as work stopped during the preparation of the corridor. The monks who occupied the tomb made certain adjustments. They added benches and a 'bed', and they decorated the rock walls with crosses, two figures of equestrian saints, Christ and inscriptions using red and yellow colours. At a later stage, in the courtyard in front of the tomb, domestic and industrial facilities as well as an almost 6-metres high mud-brick defensive tower/ keep were constructed. Access to the tower was possible through an upper-floor chamber that was reached using a ladder from the outside. Thus, it appears that the area outside the hermitage served economic purposes (e.g. craft activities, storage of raw materials for production, preparation of meals). The character of the front part of the interior was rather sacral (place of prayer), but it was also a reception area. The hermitage was probably occupied by two monks, a master and his disciple, who manufactured textiles, baskets and leather artefacts. TT 1151 is located 40m north of TT 1152. There, the alterations performed by the monks included plastering of the rock walls and floor covering. In the entrance of the corridor a pavement running 14m was laid. Most of it was a hard lime mortar and some sections at the back were of tamped clay. Just inside the entrance, the floor was composed of small limestone slabs imitating gray-white marble, decorated with a large cross whose outlines were marked with regular pieces of red-brick tiles. The mud plaster coating of the walls was decorated with elaborate geometric motifs, intersecting circles, crosses and inscriptions. Two low masonry benches, separated by a low mud-brick wall, were attached to the eastern wall of the corridor. TT 1151 was used as a place for prayer and worship instead of habitation. Three manuscripts were retrieved from the rubbish dump. These are very important and rare finds. Two of these manuscripts were books written on papyrus and bound in leather, the covers blind-tooled and decorated. One contained the Canons of Pseudo-Basil and is provisionally dated to the seventh/ eighth century. It is the only full text of these canons in the Coptic language (Sahidic dialect). The cover of the second codex is decorated with a red-painted Chi-Ro sign inside a circle and a guilloche. This book was an Enkomion of St Pisenthios, bishop of Keft (Koptos), who lived in AD 568–632. The third book was a series of 51 loose parchment cards placed among two wooden boards pasted with thin leather. One card bears a text in Greek that is dated to the eighth century. Two others, presumed to be palimpsests, contained passages from chapters 35 and 36 of the apocryphal Acts of St. Peter recounting the martyrdom of the saint. The remaining 48 cards contained some of the final chapters of the Old Testament Book of Isaiah.