The tombmakers' skills had fully matured since the days of Vizier Paser's reorganization and now they were held in due regard by the administration. Supplies and rations for their village were generous in quantity and prompt in delivery; the men of the gangs were rich beyond the wealth of ordinary craftsmen, their houses were well-furnished, their tombs the equal of those of ranking civil servants, and the village [temples were richly endowed, the gods' feasts most lavishly provisioned. Indeed, the feast days and festivals had become so large a part of the village calendar that the tombmakers now spent a third of their time in celebration. Their eight-day working week was broken up by two- or three-day weekends, amounting to sixty-odd days in the year. There were a further sixty-five days of festivals dotted throughout the calendar, which they celebrated along with the rest of the population of Thebes, even, it seems, when a royal tomb had to be finished with some urgency.

These extra state festivals included most of the full-moon days as well as others celebrating the beginning of spring, the harvest and the river's flood. The first festival of the Theban year was the Feast of Opet which in Merneptah's day started on the eighteenth day of the second month and lasted for twenty-four days until the twelfth day of the following month - from mid-August until early September. The Opet Feast began when the shrine of the god Amun was carried from the dark sanctuary of his temple at Karnak out into the Theban sunlight to be taken to visit his harem at the temple of Southern Opet - now the temple of Luxor in modern Luxor town. Shaven-headed priests carried the god, enclosed in his gilded house and veiled in linen, right through his vast temple and down to the quay outside, where he was set upon a grand altar at the centre of the cedarwood barge which would convey him to his southern harem. And the entire city of Thebes would come to the river bank to see the god's progress and join the long procession that accompanied the teams pulling the god's ponderous barge upriver with heavy tow ropes. On the immense gold-plated barge, the king and the high priest made offerings of incense and food to the god, in full view of the city, whilst along the river bank paraded all the conglomerated exotica of an empire's capital: from be-feathered African drummers to bands of young Theban girls playing lutes; from naked dancing girls turning rhythmic backward somersaults to blind harpists and the god's priestly singers; from special army units, wrestlers and royal charioteers, to thousands upon thousands of the god's acolytes who had poured out of the temples. Like the modern festivals in Upper Egypt it was a time when people thronged happily and noisily in the streets for hours - but in ancient times how terrific the scale, how exotic the event!

Eight months after the Opet Festival, at the time of the full moon of the tenth month, the second festival of the Theban year, the Feast of the Valley, was celebrated, when Amun crossed the river on his barge to visit the temples of the west. Even the dead came to see the arrival of the sacred bark at the river-landing: prayers on the walls of nobles' tomb chapels ask that their spirits may always be allowed to hear the cries of the boat crews and see the god when the king comes with him to the west. Amun's glittering barge was pulled across the river by a boat of state that held rows of oarsmen. Once more, the king and the high priest were aboard the barge, steering it and making offerings upon the altars set up before the enshrined god. During the next two days Amun would be taken into most of the royal temples where, for a while, he would join the resident gods in their sanctuaries for special rituals and offerings. Small stone sanctuaries were placed along the god's processional routes in which Amun, now mounted in his shrine and set upon a model boat, and his priestly bearers who carried this load on long heavy poles, might rest. At times of festival special loaves were baked in the temple ovens and a strong beer was fermented in the temple's breweries so the priests who carried the god were well fort)fied for the long ordeal of the procession.

Follow your desire, allow the heart to forget ...

Dress yourself in garments of fine linen . ..

Increase your beauty, and let not your heart languish. Follow your desire and what is good. Conduct yourself on earth after the dictates of your heart-

Celebrate but tire not yourself with it. Remember, no man takes his goods with him and none have returned after going!

Inadvertently the same accounts describe exactly what goods were available to the most prosperous village households of the day and give a good idea of the realistic material aspirations of other village families. We discover, for example, that the foreman and his wife Wabkhet dressed in some style. For the walk to work across the windy cliffs on a cold January morning, Neferhotep might wrap himself in a voluminous woollen cloak with some fourteen yards of fabric in it, and underneath this lavish robe he wore heavy, loose garments of wool and linen, all edged with coloured weavings and embroideries. Whilst he worked inside the tomb, where the temperature hardly varied through the year, he would change into the usual plain kilt of coarse linen and heavy leather sandals that protected his feet from the sharp chippings littering the valley floor. At home in the village Neferhotep and Wabkhet wore fine linens, long loose shirt-like garments exquisitely cut and sewn, and tied at the neck with delicate tassels. Some of the villagers wore red leather slippers similar to those still sold in Eastern bazaars and, in the summer-time, delicate papyrus sandals, beautifully woven from the reeds that grew by the river. Like the linen clothes there were distinct fashions in these sandals, special intricacies of shape and weave. One extravagant pattern, pulled up roundly at the front like the prow of a boat, was called 'Pharaoh's' sandals and was popular for formal occasions during Neferhotep's middle age.

As well as sandals, many of the foreman's household furnishings were made from reeds and rushes: baskets, fans, footstools, storage chests and the springy sleeping mats, that, when placed on the mud-brick benches of the front rooms, served the villagers as beds during the winter months. The fresh plants from which all these things were made grew wild by the river banks and craftsmen bent and trimmed their green stems as soon as they were cut and gathered so that they would shrink and dry into the shapes required of them. Such furniture is still made at Thebes today, and it is interesting to add that one still pays, as Neferhotep did, not for the finished article but for the reed and the labour of the craftsman who works it. In addition to this reed furniture, Neferhotep would have owned expensive wooden chairs, beds and headrests - a cooler if harder alternative to a woollen pillow. Surprisingly, the bed frames, based on designs thousands of years old, had their head end higher than the foot. Plaited strings formed their base, as they did the seats of the wooden chairs, which also had large woollen cushions on them during the winter. Neferhotep's household would certainly have used the fine light linen sheets made in large quantities in the Theban workshops and in winter he would have used blankets too, woven like flokati rugs, with a long loose pile to trap the body's heat. All these things were strong and well-made. Indeed, there was little in a rich village household that did not attain some measure of elegance: even the pots and pans were of careful, if traditional, design. And with foreign servants for sale at the ferry-landing, there was little that the foreman's household could have lacked.

Such was the rich household which Paneb would one day inherit. Doubtless Neferhotep made a public declaration before the village elders of his intentions towards his adopted son, then, in the last years of Ramesses '~'s reign, to strengthen further the ties between the foremen of the two gangs and their successors, Paneb was married to a relative of Foreman Hay's, named Wa'bet. Considering all the stresses that it had to undergo, their liaison proved surprisingly successful: they did not divorce, though it was common enough in the village, and they lived together for a long time and raised several children.

Surviving accounts of Paneb's household show the young workman busily acquiring the collection of goods usually to be found in the richer village households: wooden furniture, good sandals, fine linens and copper cooking cauldrons whose metal could be exchanged for grain in times of hardship. To add to the finesse of his daily table, Paneb bought sesame oil which was perhaps served then, as it is today in the Middle East, mixed with spice and water to make a thick savoury paste that is mopped from a bowl with a piece of bread. Even as a young man the foreman-designate looked to his grave as well as his house, as was proper at the village: receipts for his coffins and funeral equipment survive, dating from this period; he also built a tomb, a vaulted burial chamber glittering with yellow and white paintings, now half-destroyed. Above his vault was a chapel with a sharp little pyramid over it and a causeway, a smaller version of Foreman Neferhotep's (which was just above it) ran up to the chapel's entrance. Though lower down in the cemetery than the foreman's tombs the chapel, like Paneb himself, was well enough situated in the village hierarchy.

The god in him is Seth ... he is a man of the people-He dies by a death of . . . the failings . . . sinews . .. He is one dissolute of heart on the day of judgement ... discontent in his heart. If he drinks beer he drinks it to engender strife and turmoil. The redness of the white of his eye is this god. He i8 one who drinks what he detests. He is beloved of women through the greatness-the greatnas of his loving them. Though he is a royal kinsman he has the personality of a man of the people . . . He will not descend unto the west, but is placed on the desert as a prey to rapacious birds ... He drinks beer so as to engender turmoil and disputes ... He will take up weapons of warfare-He will not distinguish the married woman from ... As to any man who opposes him he pushes ... Massacre arises in him and he is placed in the Netherworld....