Across the river lay the city of the dead: rock cut royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, a separate valley for queens, private tombs in the hillside, and a line of mortuary temples along the edge of the cultivation where the cult of each dead king was maintained. Hatshepsut's terraced temple at Deir el-Bahari, the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu are the best preserved. Behind them lay Deir el-Medina, the walled village of the workmen who cut and painted the tombs, whose rubbish heaps produced thousands of ostraca: work rosters, letters, wills, records of the first recorded strike, and prayers.
Those prayers matter for the history of religion. They are personal in a way official texts are not, addressed to a deified Amenhotep I who served as the village oracle, to Meretseger the cobra goddess of the peak, and to Amun as the one who comes at the voice of the poor man. Some confess a fault and accept blindness or sickness as the god's answer, which is the clearest evidence Egypt has left of individual religious feeling.
The estates of Amun grew until they held a substantial share of the land, livestock and labour of Egypt. Akhenaten's move to a new capital and his attack on Amun's name in the fourteenth century BCE was answered after his death by a restoration and by the erasure of his own. By the end of the New Kingdom the High Priest of Amun at Karnak was writing his name in a royal cartouche and governing the south, while a king ruled from the delta, and the office of God's Wife of Amun, held by a royal woman, carried its own great wealth.