Hassan Fathy
Qurna is an abandoned village about 100m to the east of the Temple of Seti I. Until the early 19th century the community included at least parts of the Temple of Seti I. Several travellers, including Richard Pococke or Sonnini de Manoncourt even name a Sheikh of Qurna. Edward William Lane relates in 1825 that the village was abandoned and not a single inhabitant lived there. Comments by Isabella Frances Romer suggests that the resettling started in the late 1840s. Hassan Fathy alleges that the inhabitants of Qurna lived in poverty and thus were robbing ancient tombs as means of subsistence. In order to stop the looting the Department of Antiquities expropriated the land on which the Qurnis lived and decided to move them to a new settlement, to be designed and built by Hassan Fathy himself. New Qurna was built in the 1940s and early 1950 to house the then residents who strongly resisted the move.