The village of Deir el-Medina lay close to the Valley of the Kings at Thebes and was believed by its inhabitants to have been founded by Amenhotep I of the New Kingdom (and so in about 1500 bc). For 400 years the village contained a skilled workforce, numbering about 70 craftsmen with their families and supporting staff. Deir el-Medina was an artificial settlement and not at all typical of those lived in by the mass of the farming peasantry. The villagers were guaranteed provisions whatever the state of the harvest. Its inhabitants were literate, as they had to be in order to inscribe tombs. This has proved a boon for the excavators. Papyrus itself was cheap— a roll cost about the same as a pair of sandals—so it was possible for texts to circulate widely among those who could read and some rolls are beginners’ copies of older texts. As a result Deir el-Medina provides the richest record of how ordinary Egyptians lived and thought. The most extensive excavations of the site were those carried out by the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology between the 1920s and 1951.
The sole purpose of the village was the tunnelling and decoration of the royal tombs in the barren Valley of the Kings. At the start of each new reign, the required tomb would be plotted and work would begin cutting through the rock, plastering the inner chambers and then painting them. The tomb furniture would have to be made. The queens would be given their own, less opulent tombs, in a separate valley. Once a royal death had taken place there would be a rush to get everything in order for the burial just seventy days later and then work would have to begin on the successor’s tomb.
As the workers were given access to the secrets and treasures of the tombs, they were cut off from the rest of Egyptian society, isolated within walls at night when they were not away working in the valley. The village relied on being provisioned from the outside with grain from the stores of the local temples and water brought up on the backs of donkeys by its own water-carriers. Marriages took place within the community and skills were passed on within families from one generation to the next. Families were not large, in one ‘census’ only one household is recorded as having as many as five members and there are several men living on their own. Older children seemed to have moved out of their parents’ house, left the village, or set up their own homes. The earliest cemetery, to the east of the settlement, showed that even the smallest child was given a formal burial in an ‘infants’ section’ with another plot reserved for adolescents.
Among the workmen at Deir el-Medina were painters, plasterers, woodcarvers, sculptors, masons, and scribes as well as unskilled labourers. The village had its own police force and a ‘domestic staff’ of launderers, slave women to mill flour, doorkeepers, and messengers. Its houses, which opened on to the main street of the village, were built on a common pattern. There were three or four main rooms one
Behind the other. The first appears to have served as a household shrine, then there was a main living-room, often with columns and a skylight, a sleeping area, and an open kitchen at the back. A cellar would hold the family treasures (the master of the house often placed his bed over its entrance) while the roof was also used as space for living or sleeping. The walls had niches for the household gods. Bes, the dwarf god, the protector of families and women in childbirth, was usually the most prominent, but Taweret, the goddess of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, represented as a pregnant hippopotamus, and Hathor, guardian of womenfolk and domestic bliss, were also common. There was a temple to Hathor just outside the village. (Hathor, the daughter of Ra, combined several attributes in her personality— the tenderness of a mother caring for her children and the fury of a lioness protecting them, as well as, in a sensuous human form, female sexuality.) Furnishings were well crafted but simple—low stools, wooden bed-frames, pottery, with mats and baskets of woven rush.
The workmen were given one day free in every ten. Later in the New Kingdom this seems to have been increased to two. These ‘weekends’ could be used for the workmen’s own craft and building work. Many had their own sets of tools. They decorated their houses and often left their names on the doorposts. In the later dynasties a new cemetery grew up on a hillside to the west of the village. It was carefully planned. The tombs of the ordinary workmen were grouped around that of their Chief Workman (there were usually two teams, one working on each side of a tomb) and aligned with the royal tomb they had been building in the valley beyond. The burial chambers were quarried into the hillside or under the ground and whole families shared the tomb, although only the prominent members had their own coffins. Chapels of mudbrick, painted white and often surmounted by a small pyramid, stood outside each entrance.
The jottings on the potsherds cover every aspect of daily life, letters, records of work done, accounts of disputes, snatches of hymns or literature, and magic spells against illness. They give a lively picture of life in the village, wives walking out on husbands, celebrations on the feast days of the gods or favoured kings, workmen being stung by scorpions, heavy drinking on birthdays, the mourning of a lost friend. Inevitably there were tensions and disputes (and instances when tomb goods were stolen) and these were resolved by a village council. When matters appeared deadlocked there was a ritual in which a statue of the founder, the deified pharaoh Amen-hotep, was carried in procession through the village by the village elders. This ritual seems to have concentrated minds and a verdict was eventually produced which was written down by a scribe and signed by the elders. Punishments could, however, be harsh, a hundred blows with a stick, branding, or hard labour. In the Nineteenth Dynasty one Peneb was sent off to the desert mines after being accused of taking on workers for his own projects and sleeping around with the wives of the village. Yet, if anything went wrong, the rations on which the village was dependent failed to come through, for instance, the villagers sank their differences in a united hostility to the outside world. (An excellent introduction to Deir el-Medina is A. G. MacDowell, Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs, Oxford, 2001.)
World History
