Every morning before dawn, a man loaded clay jars of water onto rented donkeys and walked an hour through the desert hills to a village that could not exist without him. And every morning, behind those whitewashed walls, the finest artists in Egypt woke, ate bread their wives had baked in domed ovens, and climbed the ridge to paint the corridors where pharaohs would sleep forever.

The workers' village of Deir el‑Medina, tucked into a dry valley in the hills west of ancient Thebes during the reign of Ramesses the Great. The Place of Truth, a walled settlement of seventy houses where the painters, draughtsmen, and stonecutters who built the royal tombs lived with their families in a world apart, supplied by water carriers and servants, governed by their own foremen, and bound together by secrecy, craft, and the rhythms of a life lived between ...