In the shadow of the Theban Necropolis, Rajab Shimi remains the final sentinel of Old Qurna. This evocative feature explores a life anchored in ancestral caverns, the bitterness of bureaucratic displacement, and the lyrical preservation of a village that now exists only in the corridors of memory.
Perched atop the Qurna mountain, nestled against the hallowed silence of ancient Pharaonic tombs, lives a man solitary in a village that no longer exists except in the corridors of memory. Rajab Jaber Talba Ali Shimi is the final permanent resident of Old Qurna Marei. Or, at least, that is how he introduces himself with a quiet dignity before unraveling a narrative that spans over a century, anchored in a single house he has never forsaken since his birth in 1967.
More Than Mere Masonry
“I am the only one who has remained here since the moment I was born,” Rajab says. “I have never left this house.” The structure, as he describes it, is not merely walls of tub laban (sun-dried mud brick), but rather geological strata of history. It was erected over ancient caverns inhabited by his ancestors centuries ago, when the Nile’s inundation would swallow the lowlands, driving the people to the mountain’s zenith in search of salvation. This was an era when antiquities were known in the local tongue as masakhit (ancient deformities), their historical gravity not yet anchored in the public consciousness.
However, the tide that turned was not just the Nile’s, but humanity’s. In 1997, the state initiated a mass relocation project to move the villagers of Qurna to modern housing, an effort to safeguard the archaeological sites. Most families departed, but Rajab remained. It was not an act of defiance, but a bureaucratic erasure: his name was absent from the compensation ledgers.
“They told me, ‘You have no record here.’ I tried every avenue, pleading with them to register my name, assuming it was a clerical oversight, but to no avail,” he recounts. His tone is hushed, devoid of outward rage, yet saturated with a long-steeping bitterness. Neither he nor his brothers received compensation, leaving him to linger in the ancestral home while his kin scattered between New Qurna and the surrounding districts.
A House Breathless Within the Mountain
The irony is that Rajab did not choose isolation; it was thrust upon him. “My brothers should have stayed with me, but the house cannot bear the weight of us all, so it is just my wife and I here now,” he explains. He gestures toward the formidable walls, half a meter thick, which grant the home a singular alchemy: it is a sanctuary of coolness in the summer and a cradle of warmth in winter. Inside the maghara (mountain cave), where the house extends deep into the mountain’s heart, the laws of thermodynamics shift. When the mercury outside strikes 45 degrees, the interiority of the cave remains a temperate 25.
Despite the austerity of his existence the absence of running water, the impossibility of restoration due to archaeological mandates, and a roof compromised since the torrential floods of the nineties Rajab insists that this place offers a raha nafsiyya (psychological serenity) found nowhere else. “My memories are here. This is where I played football as a child; this is where we watched the minaret of Abu al-Haggag illuminate at the hour of Maghrib (sunset prayer),” he says, summoning childhood vignettes with a vividness that suggests they are happening in the present tense.
Yet, nostalgia does not erase his inner conflict. When asked if he would depart should compensation finally arrive, he wavers. “I do not know if we would feel joy or grief. Your entire history is here, yet there is also this suffering.” He describes his state as being “between two fires,” each more scorching than the last.
Qurna and Ba’irat: A Lost Communion
Old Qurna, in Rajab’s eyes, was not merely a location but a complete tapestry of life. It was a cohesive community without closed doors, where a neighbor might enter another’s home and open the refrigerator without a second thought. “We were one house; there was no distinction between Qurna and Ba’irat. We were a single soul,” he says. During the nights of the Moulid (religious festival), the village moved as one. Whoever owned a straw mat brought it; whoever had a water ewer shared it. Meals were a communal symphony, cooked together without the need for hired hands.
Today, that world has undergone a stark transformation. In New Qurna, where the majority now reside, life wears a veneer of modernity, but Rajab finds it devoid of warmth. “You might not even know your neighbor. People ask questions not to offer comfort, but to pry into your affairs,” he remarks, drawing a sharp contrast between two eras.
The shift was not merely social, but existential. Rajab recounts how the relocation severed the bond with the land. As fields grew distant from their owners, they were either abandoned or sold. “A man used to have his cow and his sheep; now he just sits on a bed in front of the television,” he says, lamenting the loss of the daily rhythm that once imbued life with meaning. As for him, he lives on the periphery of this change, tending a small plot of land with his brothers and clutching an old flour-trading license that has fallen into obsolescence. “No one is going to travel 15 kilometers just to collect a flour ration,” he says, noting the mountain’s divorce from the economic pulse of the valley.
The Burden of History
Despite his proximity to the world’s most storied monuments—the Temple of Habu, the Colossi of Memnon, and the Valley of the Queens this geography does not grant Rajab a privilege so much as it deepens his paradox. He lives in the heart of history, yet remains outside the present. He watches the tourists pass by, greeting them with a few English phrases before retreating into his solitude.
“We were guardians here more than anything else,” he asserts, an implicit defense against the long-standing stigma that linked the people of Qurna to tanqib (illicit excavation). He maintains that the vast majority were simple farmers and that the modern valuation of these treasures had not yet dawned on the people of old.
Within the walls of this house, many narratives intersect: stories of displacement, of memory, of absent justice, and of social upheaval. Yet, in the final accounting, Rajab’s tale remains deeply personal. He is a man who found himself omitted from the ledgers of the living, choosin or perhaps forced to remain a ghost in his own home.
When asked if the loneliness ever becomes a weight, he does not answer directly. He looks around at the mountain, at the hollowed, abandoned houses, and whispers: “The people were here. We were all here.” Perhaps that is the essence of his story: it is not that Rajab lives alone now, but that he continues to live among those who have long since departed.
