Statue of the Goddess Meretseger

Above the Valley of the Kings rises a peak about 420 metres high, shaped almost like a pyramid, which is now called el-Qurn, the Horn. The workmen of Deir el-Medina passed beneath it on the mountain path to the royal tombs, and for them the mountain was a goddess. They called her Meretseger, she who loves silence, or simply the Peak of the West, and they imagined her as a cobra. In this limestone figure she is a coiled snake with a woman's head.

She guarded the necropolis, and she punished. A snakebite or an illness could be taken as her answer to an offence. A workman called Neferabu set up a stela confessing that he had been a man who could not tell right from wrong, that he had gone against the Peak, and that she had taught him a lesson. When he called on her, he says, she came to him like a sweet breeze and made him forget his illness, and he warned others to beware of the Peak. His stela comes from the same village and stands in the same case as this statue.