Andrés Diego Espinel: Some profane and sacred features from Thebes

A talk at the conference Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces, held in Prague in June 2014. http://egyptologie.ff.cuni.cz/pdf/Lan...

Andrés Diego Espinel (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales CSIC, Madrid, Spain)
Some profane and sacred features from Thebes: Hunting grounds (?) and high places in the West bank

The paper aims to offer some fresh interpretations on two poorly understood features attested in the mountains and wadis of the West Bank at Luxor. The first one, already documented long time ago by Petrie and Mond and Myers, are several stone walls that enclose the lower and middle course of two wadis. The first one is at the north of the road to the Valley of Kings, and the other one in the Armant area. According to their position along their gentler slopes and across the mouth of minor tributary wadis, and to other archaeological and epigraphic data is possible to suggest that these walls formed part of two hunting grounds possibly of Roman date (an earlier dating cannot be discarded however). The other feature under study is the so-called high places at the feet of el-Qurn peak. These small stone chapels, grouped in two different clusters, were first attested by Norman de Garis Davies. They were made by Deir el-Medina workers, probably in connection with the station du repos du col. The religious meaning of these small structures will be reconsidered having in mind their emplacement, orientation, materiality, line of sight with some other important religious traits of the Theban geography, and other similar parallels.