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Shortly before the excavation season was over, Desroches was invited to attend the wedding of one of the workers. As she watched the ceremony, which included a procession of relatives and friends presenting gifts to the newlyweds, she was struck by how closely this modern tableau of gift giving resembled scenes she had seen on the walls of funeral chapels outside Deir-el-Medina. “These same gestures, these same concerns had been passed down from millennium to millennium without major changes,” she later wrote.