WATANI International
The first dwellings in the village of Gurna appeared some 200 years ago; built of mud-brick, they crowned the hill on top of the Tombs of the Nobles some way from the green fringe on Luxor’s west bank.
Gurna was founded on the dark side of tourism. There was no reason to live there, on the sandy rocks such a long walk from the fields, unless to live off the titbits of tourism or ferret illegally for buried treasure. The village harboured an air of mystery, of intriguing histories of tomb robbers and rogues.
Of course, that was years ago, but the village does sit sprawl over an important archaeological area that need to be examined. The residents were therefore moved in January 2007 to a new location at Taref. Egyptologists anxiously await their chance to dig the approximately 1,000 tombs under Gurna’s 800 houses, although there are likely to be no unopened tombs under the village.
Staying put
In the 2007 move, the Gurna residents were relocated to a new town that was made ready to absorb 3,200 families. Yet this was not the first attempt to move the villagers of Gurna. Some 60 years ago, the government tried to move them to a new village designed by Hassan Fathy (see main article).
According to Samir Farag, governor of Luxor, 3,400 families—about 20,000 individuals—have moved to the new town, which was established at a cost of LE185 million on 286 feddans. The new houses were given to the residents as compensation for their houses in the old Gurna.
The action prompted UNESCO to issue a report warning Egypt that Luxor would be eliminated from the international heritage map, especially when the Egyptian government had paid no attention to the frequent reports of UNESCO about Gurna.
Home to archaeologists
The village, which is situated in the bosom of the mountain, overlooks the Valley of the Kings—the vast burial ground of the kings of Egypt the golden age of the New Kingdom (ca, 1550 – 1069 BC).
According to Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Gurna was mentioned by numerous European travellers from the late 17th century onwards. In 1820, many Europeans working there took up permanent residence, building houses for themselves, their families, friends and visitors. The British Consul Henry Salt built a house for one of the most important of his men, Giovanni d’Athanasi, known as Yanni. This is considered the first modern house in the hills of the district. Yanni##s house was built in the form of a small fortress, surrounded by a group of other buildings. Below the house is the part tomb-dwelling of Sheikh Osman, built of mud bricks.
Among the travellers who visited the district in the 18th century was the Jesuit Father Claude Sicard, who made a Nile journey to preach to the Copts of Upper Egypt, and made excellent studies of the antiquities there. Likewise in that period appeared Frederick Lewis Norden, a Danish artist sent by King Christian VI on a journey of discovery to Egypt. Pococke published a travel book in 1743, while the travels of Norden were published in 1755. These are considered the first modern attempts at a precise description of Egypt.
Heavy weights
Also linked to Gurna are the names of many of the people whose names were connected with the discoveries: the most famous—and notorious—of these was the Abdel-Rasul family, some of whom were expert at lifting and moving extremely heavy yet fragile material, such as huge statues. Formerly, though, members of the family were antiquities dealers who cooperated with European consuls in trafficking antiquities. Some of them worked with Mustafa Agha, who smuggled thousands of antiquities abroad, such as a group of mummies which were sold to the Niagara Falls Museum in Canada, including one believed to be that of Ramesses I. Agha also exported some archaeological pieces, in cooperation with the Abdel-Rasul family, from the cache of mummies found hidden in a cave and later turned over to the then Antiquities Director Auguste Mariette.
Digging through
All the people of Gurna were considered experts in excavation and worked at various sites in Upper Egypt and the Delta. Some of the people of Gurna, Hawass said, built their houses directly over the tombs and proceeded to use one of the tombs as store-rooms for stolen antiquities. Their dwellings over the tombs also damaged the monuments, and many dug through the floors of their homes or built houses over likely sites to shield their activities.
By way of compromise, 25 historic houses have been left in situ to leave an account of this period of history.
The Gurna dwellers did not deny the charges laid against them by the government. One, who refused to give his name, said they lived over the tombs and no one was aware of their actions. Some refuse to abandon their locations, which they considered treasures that would not be granted to them again. Other residents preferred to move rather than continue with the hard conditions on the mountainside.