Most ordinary Egyptians left no words. One village is the great exception. In a narrow valley on the west bank at Thebes lived the craftsmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and they wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
Key idea
The craftsmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs lived at Deir el-Medina (ancient name: Set-maat, "the Place of Truth"). Thousands of their notes on ostraca, flakes of limestone and pieces of pottery, survive, along with papyri, giving the names, work, quarrels, debts and jokes of ordinary workers.
The village
- Founded early in the 18th Dynasty and lived in until the end of the 20th, about 450 years.
- About seventy houses inside a wall, each with a few rooms in a row, plus more houses outside.
- The crew was split into a "right side" and a "left side", each with a foreman, plus a scribe who kept the records.
- They worked in shifts, sleeping near the tomb during their working days, then walked home over the hill for days off.
- They built their own fine tombs, with small pyramids, on the hillside above the village.
Why it works
These men were skilled, literate or partly literate, and paid by the state, and they lived in a dry place where limestone flakes for writing lay everywhere. Notes that elsewhere would have been written on papyrus and lost were scratched on stone and kept. The excavations of Bernard Bruyère and others in the 1900s recovered them by the thousand.
What the ostraca tell
| Kind of note | Example |
|---|---|
| Work registers | who was absent and why: ill, brewing beer, stung by a scorpion, a family celebration |
| Sales and debts | a coffin or a donkey traded for goods worth so many deben |
| Court cases | quarrels about property, theft or unpaid debts, heard by a local court |
| Letters and literature | family letters, school copies of classic texts, love songs, sketches |
Worked example: Reading a register
A work register lists a man as absent because he was "brewing beer". What does that tell a historian?
- The scribe recorded absences and their reasons, so work was carefully tracked.
- Brewing beer was a normal reason to miss a day, accepted by the foreman.
- So we learn both how the state managed labor and what ordinary life included.
Answer: That work was closely recorded, and that home life and festivals were part of the workers' rights.
The village also produced the records of the first known strike, and the will of a woman named Naunakhte, which you will meet in Women in Ancient Egypt. Explore the site on the map of Ancient Egypt.
Common mistake
Thinking we know only about kings. Deir el-Medina gives the names, quarrels, debts and jokes of ordinary workers. Remember, though, that these were skilled, well-paid craftsmen, not typical farmers.