Long before the Valley of the Kings existed, people were living — and burying their dead — at El-Tarif. It’s the oldest occupied site in the entire Theban Necropolis, with evidence stretching from Late Paleolithic stone tools through a Predynastic farming village to the massive tombs of Thebes’s first royal dynasty.
A Timeline Spanning Thousands of Years
The evidence at El-Tarif layers up roughly like this:
- Late Paleolithic — stone tools linked to Nubia’s Qadan tool tradition
- Early Holocene, around the 6th millennium BC — the “Tarifian” culture: a hunting, gathering, and fishing camp with its own distinct flint and pottery industry
- Around 3700 BC — a small Naqada-culture farming village, among the earliest stone-foundation buildings recorded in Upper Egypt
- Second half of the 11th Dynasty (around 2100–2000 BC) — the huge royal saff-tombs of Thebes’s earliest rulers
- Later periods — continued reuse and the growth of the modern village of At-Tarif on top of the site
Where El-Tarif Sits
El-Tarif lies at the base of the Theban cliffs, about 5 km north of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, in the administrative district of Qurna — north of the road that runs past the Temple of Seti I, and just north of the Nobles’ tombs and Dra’ Abu el-Naga. It’s a large stretch of flattish desert land, dotted with a handful of huge three-sided saff-tombs and hundreds of smaller ones of every size.
The site was first mapped between 1826 and 1830 by Scottish collector Robert Hay and English Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated some of the smaller tombs here in 1908–1909, leaving the royal tombs out of his report; the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli separately investigated the tomb of the pharaoh Iti in 1911. The site was gradually built over by the modern settlement of El-Tarif not long after. Dieter Arnold resumed excavation from 1966–1974, and a Polish team — Bolesław Ginter, Janusz Kozłowski, and Joachim Śliwa — investigated its Predynastic layers from 1978–1982. Petrie divided the roughly 1,200-by-600-meter cemetery into what he called sections “A” and “B,” dating the graves to the 11th and 12th Dynasties, though their exact locations remain unclear. Arnold’s best stratigraphic evidence for the site’s full sequence came from excavating between two 4th Dynasty mastaba tombs, where the layers of gravel and soil above bedrock were undisturbed.
Signs of Ancient Life Long Before the Pharaohs
Stone tools from the Late Paleolithic period, related to Nubia’s Qadan tradition, were found near the top of the site’s gravel bedrock. Above that, a layer of wind-blown soil contains tools now known as “Tarifian,” dated to the early Holocene. Excavation between the two mastabas uncovered a hearth surrounded by more than 3,200 flint objects — mostly retouched flakes and scrapers, with only a few microliths — alongside plain potsherds, including early “bread mold” shapes, bowls, and jars with cylindrical necks. Rather than settled farming, the lack of buildings and worn sickle-edges on the tools points to a camp built around hunting, gathering, and fishing.
The Tarifian is closely related to Nubia’s Post-Shamarkian stone-tool tradition and likely descended from the microlithic industries of the surrounding region — meaning the earliest pottery in the Nile Valley developed alongside a foraging economy, not a farming one. The first radiocarbon date from a Tarifian site nearby came out to roughly 5,200 BC (calibrated), and similar tool-and-pottery combinations, including the distinctive Badarian rippled ware, turn up at Hamamieh in Middle Egypt.
The Naqada Village at El-Tarif
Later, El-Tarif was home to a Predynastic Naqada-culture settlement — two excavated houses here are the earliest thoroughly documented examples of stone-foundation building in Upper Egypt. Three separate habitation phases produced roughly 3,400 potsherds, most of it a coarse, organic-tempered ware similar to pottery found at el-Khattara in the Naqada region. The site’s stone-tool industry from this period is unusually rich, built around blade production, including a then-new style of rectangular sickle blade. Plant remains show emmer wheat and barley under cultivation; faunal evidence, though poorly preserved, includes domesticated sheep and goats. A hearth from this layer gave a calibrated radiocarbon date of 3,715 BC, while earlier thermoluminescence dating on the pottery itself suggested a slightly older range of roughly 3,810–4,340 BC.
The Saff-Tombs of the Early 11th Dynasty
El-Tarif’s most famous feature is a type of tomb found almost nowhere else in Egypt: the saff-tomb, named from the Arabic word for “row.” A saff-tomb is built around a wide open court with a row (or two) of pillars cut from the gravel at the back — openings that were long mistaken for separate burial-chamber entrances rather than the front of a single tomb. This form emerged regionally during the First Intermediate Period, evolving from late Old Kingdom tomb designs, and reached its most monumental scale in the tombs of Thebes’s earliest 11th Dynasty rulers.
The El-Tarif saff-tomb cemetery covers roughly 1.2 km north to south and 0.6 km east to west, and is thought to contain somewhere between 300 and 400 saff-tombs — though it’s never been systematically excavated in full. Auguste Mariette, Gaston Maspero, and Georges Daressy dug test trenches here between 1860 and 1889, turning up a fragment of a stela (CG 20512) belonging to the Theban ruler Wahankh Intef II. Petrie excavated some of the smaller tombs in 1908–1909 but left the royal tombs out of his report. Dieter Arnold’s systematic excavation of the royal tombs, from 1966–1974, produced a detailed 1:1000 scale survey map of the entire cemetery — the most complete record of the site to date.
Inside the Three Royal Tombs
Three enormous royal tombs dominate the cemetery, known locally as Saff el-Dawaba, Saff el-Kisasija, and Saff el-Baqar. Each had a court 100–300 meters long and 65–80 meters wide, originally enclosed by mudbrick walls and buried about 5 meters below the surface under piles of excavated gravel. Two rows of 20–24 pillars, cut directly from the gravel at the back of each court, formed the tomb’s real façade. Behind the pillars, a short corridor leads to a royal cult chamber supported by two pillars, from which either a vertical shaft or a sloping passage descends to the burial chamber itself. Smaller side chambers along the court walls held burials of royal family members and courtiers.
A fragment of Wahankh Intef II’s stela — showing the king with his five named dogs — identifies Saff el-Kisasija as his tomb. The other two royal tombs have no surviving inscriptions naming their owners, but archaeological evidence shows Saff el-Dawaba is the oldest of the three and Saff el-Baqar the most recent; on that basis, they’re generally attributed to Sehertawi Intef I and Nakhtnebtepnefer Intef III. The private tombs surrounding them, smaller versions of the same design, fall into two rough groups — an older series with a single pillar supporting the cult-chamber roof, and later tombs with two — but with their stelae long gone, their owners are lost to history.
Visiting El-Tarif Today
El-Tarif isn’t a ticketed site the way most of the Theban Necropolis is — there’s no interior tomb visit here comparable to Sheikh Abd el-Qurna or the Valley of the Kings. Much of the ancient cemetery now sits beneath the modern village, and what’s visible is largely open, low-lying terrain rather than a formal, staffed attraction. It’s a worthwhile stop for anyone specifically interested in Egypt’s deep prehistory or the origins of the saff-tomb, best combined with a visit to the nearby Temple of Seti I or Dra’ Abu el-Naga, but it’s not set up for casual sightseeing the way the rest of the necropolis is.
