• DOI:10.2307/1512902
• Corpus ID: 191398579

Amenemhat I and the Early Twelfth Dynasty at Thebes

@article{Arnold1991AmenemhatIA,
  title={Amenemhat I and the Early Twelfth Dynasty at Thebes},
  author={Dorothea Arnold},
  journal={Metropolitan Museum Journal},
  year={1991},
  volume={26},
  pages={5 - 48}
}

• D. Arnold
• Published 1 January 1991
• History
• Metropolitan Museum Journal

Qurna and Qurnet Marai in the Theban necropolis runs a valley that meets the floodplain at the site of the mortuary temple of Rameses II, the Ramesseum (Figures i, 2). The valley is a counterpart to the valley of Deir el-Bahri, where the temples of Mentuhotep II Nebhepetra and Hatshepsut are situated. But unlike the Deir el-Bahri valley, this valley does not contain famous standing monuments. Today, the valley presents a wild, almost desolate, appearance (Figures 3, 5, 21). A closer look, however, reveals features that indicate major landscaping efforts were undertaken in ancient times. Figures 2 and 3 show two separate places where quarrymen cut trenches into the rock preparatory to removing the entire rock face at the southwestern side of the valley.2 And at the western end of the valley where the limestone rock surrounds a natural bay, a considerable part of the ground was leveled to form an even plateau (Figure 3). Herbert E. Winlock in 1914 was the first to recognize that the plateau and trenches were traces of building activities.3 The discovery was important enough for him to record it in the opening paragraphs of The Rise and Fall of the Middle Kingdom in Thebes (1947). It is a memorable description of archaeological intuition: