The workers lived in their own city near the Valley of the Queens
With consistent construction on the royal tombs, an individual town was established for the workers to live. Located south of the Valley of the Kings and east of the Valley of the Queens, Deir el-Medina reached its height during the Nineteenth Dynasty, although archaeological evidence uncovered in the ruins of the settlement dates back to the reign of Thutmose I in the early fifteenth century BCE. Deir el-Medina remained occupied with skilled and unskilled workers until the end of the Twentieth Dynasty.
Excavations of the worker city provide a glimpse of how these workers lived and the overall condition of nonroyal life in the New Kingdom. The city was highly organized, with homes built close together in a rectangular grid using the same construction procedures; there is no evidence of natural additions that other settlements show as they grow in size. Deir el-Medina shows signs of a hierarchy, with the larger, more comfortable homes reserved for the most talented and in-demand workers of a higher status.
The pharaoh highly valued the workers, who would be considered middle-class by today’s standards. Women could read and write, and the workers could pass down their in-demand positions to their children. The residents of Deir el-Medina received almost three times more rations than a typical laborer, and the pharaoh provided them with extra supplies and rations to comfortably observe religious holidays. The workers were given enough days off to have another job and construct their tombs in their free time.
By the reign of Ramses XI in the early eleventh century BCE, the laborers abandoned Deir el-Medina due to the instability of the age and the constant threat of tomb robbery and civil war. In the fourth century BCE, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt constructed a temple devoted to the goddess Hathor at the former site of the worker city. Christians later repurposed the temple into a church during the Roman era. The Arabic name Deir el-Medina refers to this church, translating to “the monastery of the town.”