The Workmen's Village, located in the desert 1.2 kilometres (0.75 mi) east of the ancient city of Akhetaten (modern Amarna), was built during the reign of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten.

[1] Though an isolated part of Amarna, the Workmen's Village provides many well preserved artifacts and buildings allowing archaeologists to gather much information about how society functioned.

The Workmen's Village has been known since the surveys of British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in the 1890s,[2] but was first excavated in 1921 by the Egypt Exploration Society.

The best preserved decoration depicts dancing figures of Bes along with the goddess Taweret, and in a separate house a scene of women and girls who may be musicians or dancers.

[9][10] Finds from within the houses are consistent with everyday life: amulets, beads, fragments of matting, spindle whorls, rings, headrests, and pottery.

The limited range of cattle bones recovered indicates that joints of beef were likely part of the rations and that they were not being raised on-site.

The fact the villagers were going to such efforts to try to be partially self-sufficient indicates that the state had a limited role in providing for the needs of the people.

[18] The Main Chapel, located to the southeast of the walled village, is the largest and best understood, having been protected from robbers by piles of spoil from the excavations in the 1920s.

Decoration from the Sanctuary included two vultures grasping shen rings and feather fans, and a winged sun disc, and bouquets, all likely from the east wall, above the shrine doorways.

[21] The decoration of the Inner Hall featured chequered and looped lotus friezes, semi-circular garlands, male and female figures, and hieroglyphs.

The south wall was less well preserved but likely featured a complimentary scene painted on a yellow ground; these figures are presumed to have been depicted standing.

[25] Weatherhead and Kemp elaborate as follows: The Workmen's Village chapels... show that people really did prepare and eat meals in spiritually charged locations... At the Amarna Workmen's Village (and at Deir el-Medina) the local combination of a small and prescribed house size and abundant external space allowed people to think more expansively and to build separate places - the chapels - which satisfied both the desire to express spirituality and the convenient accommodation of the feasting element of honouring the spiritual essence of family headship, that included ancestors... By this view, the Workmen's Village chapels are the product of contingency: the isolation of the village and its cramped interior, the unusual closeness of its cemetery, and the existence of much open space brought out within the villagers a fuller architectural expression of spiritual communion, combining meals with commemoration, than was open to people of similar or even higher social standing within the city proper.

The Workmen's Village has suffered less disturbance than the main city, and its greater preservation provides a better chance at understanding everyday life during the Amarna Period.

The remote desert location of the Workmen's Village affords better preservation of materials such as texitles and wood, as destructive insect activity is lower.

Additionally, twisted linen wicks smeared with incense were found, giving a window into the scents present in homes.

The worship of other gods was suppressed and their temples closed; Amun received the harshest treatment, with his name eventually being hacked out where it occurred.

The fragments from the Main Chapel are in the "Htp-di-nswt" format and call Amun the "good ruler eternally, lord of heaven, who made the whole earth.

Peet and Woolley suggested that the worship of the traditional gods continued throughout the reign of Akhenaten, and that the distance separating the Workmen's Village from the main city afforded it more freedom in this regard.

They also interpret the presence of the name of Amun as an indication that the decoration dates to the early reign of Tutankhamun, when orthodoxy was returning.

[30] More recently, Weatherhead and Kemp suggest that the use of the traditional art style instead of the court style in the decoration of the chapels indicates a separation between public life, with its displays of loyalty to the king, and private life, where expressions of grief and commemoration remained largely unchanged and traditional.