ABSTRACT
Nile at Thebes was the city of the living, in which the Pharaoh and his court resided and all the civil life of the capital was carried on. The western bank was the great necropolis, or city of the dead. Here the limestone cliffs are honeycombed with tombs, and in the plain below the great mortuary temples of the Pharaohs spread out in a long line, each succeeding King adding another in which his funerary cult should be celebrated and the canonical offerings and commemorations should be solemnised. The nobles and citizens combined the chapel and the tomb in one unit, but the Kings separated them, the temples standing apart from their sepulchres, which latter were excavated at some distance away in the wild and rocky gorge known as Biban-el-Moluk, or the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. In this valley the tombs of nearly all the sovereigns of the XVIIIth, XIXth and XXth Dynasties have been found. Some were known and standing open in Greek times, as the graffiti on the walls show. Others have been hidden by drifting sand or by falls from the limestone cliffs above them, and have been rediscovered in modern times: all of them save one 1 were without occupants, the plunderers having stripped them in bygone ages.
