jenniferrpovey:
memecucker:
memecucker:
What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.
Since this is getting notes here’s a link to a translation of the papyrus scroll and here’s an article that gets further into the economic situation surrounding the strike and giving an explanation of the events. The workers didnt just refuse to construct Rameses III’s future tomb, they actually occupied the Valley of the Kings and were preventing anyone from entering to perform rituals or funerals. Basically they set up the first ever recorded picket line
Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.
Eventually the tomb workers were able to win the day and acquire their demands and actually set a precedent for organized labor and strikes in Egyptian society that continued for a long time
The jubilee in 1156 BCE was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.
[…]
The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.
There was also a strike at one point where construction workers refused to continue until they were given sufficient “cosmetics.”
This was thought a highly strange thing until somebody deciphered the recipe for the “cosmetics” the workers were demanding and recreated it.
It was sunscreen. Sunscreen.
Making that the first recorded strike over occupational safety.
Turin Strike Papyrus? I love the Turin Strike Papyrus! However, there’s a fair bit of misunderstanding about what the papyrus actually says, the context in which the strike happened, and some modern bias which is distorting what the Egyptians are actually telling us.
Firstly, it wasn’t sunscreen. It was cooking oils. The TSP contains the only recorded strikes in Ancient Egypt, and it doesn’t mention anything about sunscreen. They say:
iw Dd n=sn i-ir.t pH nA r HA.t Hqr r HA.t ibw mk=n n Hbsw mk=n n sqnn mk=n n rm mk=n n symw
hAb n pr-aA pAy=n nb nfr Hr r-r=sn mtw=tn hAb n TAty pAy=n Hry-tp iry.n=n an anx iry Hr xA n=sn dy n Abd 5 m pA hrw
‘They said to them “We have come because of hunger and thirst. Look we have no clothing. No oil. No fish. No vegetables.
Send to Pharaoh our good lord about it and send for the Vizier, our superior, so that sustenance is provided for us.” And the rations of the fifth month were issued to them on this date’
The word we need here is ‘sqnn’ which is a misspelling of ‘sgnn’ or ‘tallow/oil’ (following Faulkner’s MEg dictionary). For those who don’t know, tallow is animal fat and it’s not being used in ‘sunscreen’ it’s being used by the Egyptians in their cooking.
So, now we’ve got that out of the way, I can explain where the discrepancies/misunderstandings happen in the rest of post.
Ancient Egypt is a non monetary economy. They don’t have money or coins until much later periods. What they do is work on a barter system of goods and services, using weights as a measure of whether something is a fair ‘price’. Workers are paid in grains, beer, oils, and meat. This is completely normal. So the workers in the TSP are not striking for ‘better wages’ and the bringing of food and grain isn’t an insult. This is a misunderstanding. They’re striking to be paid in the first place, and the offering of grain and food is an attempt at part payment of what they’re owed.
Basically, from the first entry they’re saying ‘it has been 18 Days in the month and we are hungry’. A week in Ancient Egypt is 10 days, so these workers haven’t been paid in nearly two weeks, and this means the ‘payment’ (which is food stuffs) of previous weeks has almost run out and they’re going hungry. This is where the second misunderstanding of the posts above comes in, because it lacks context. At this point in the reign of Ramesses III, and technically previous kings too, there’s a famine. The harvests have been very poor, due to the Egyptian calendar ‘slipping’ and the seasons moving out of alignment. This is because the calendar is only 360 days long, and doesn’t account for the leap year. So over the centuries the timings of things have slipped out of order. They’re striking for a very good reason, they haven’t been paid, but conversely they haven’t been paid because the granaries are empty and there’s nothing to pay them with.
Coincidentally, this economic crisis, alongside subsequent weak and short lived leadership, is what caused the collapse of the Egyptian ‘New Kingdom’. It also spurred the Egyptians to start robbing their own tombs, which, by this point in Egyptian history they were already doing but it increased markedly from this point onwards.
Anyway, the post above says that the offer of this food was ‘rebuffed because the workers said they weren’t hungry and evil had been done in this place of Pharaoh’ and that’s also a misunderstanding. OP conflates the original strike (Year 29, month 4, day 10), in which the workers were offered food and this was accepted, with another incident (Year 29, Month 7, no day recorded) in which they said they were on strike because of the ‘evil done in this place of Pharaoh.’ Two separate incidents 3 months apart and not connected. The ‘month 7’ strike was because of action taken during a strike a few days earlier when the workers sat in the necropolis and the Artisan Mose son of Aanakht said something and was beaten for it. Basically, what he said is a complex idiom, and from what we’ve been able to work out so far it’s an sacrilegious insult towards the King or a god so the Medjay beat him for it. The workers are protesting the beating on the following days. That is the ‘evil’ done.
I’d take some issue with the ‘They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively.’ part because that’s placing a modern viewpoint onto the ancient record and distorts the narrative. We cannot possibly know what they understood by striking, and they don’t understand the ‘class’ system the in the same way we do. I had to do a section on this for my thesis, and it’s impossible to show a class system within Ancient Egypt, except the models we force onto their culture, because their definitions of where someone is in society isn’t based on money but a complex system of ‘where you come after the Gods and whether or not you can read’. Der König als Sonnenpriester (The King as Sun Priest) is a good example of this, which has 12 sections of people divided into two groups of six and it’s Complicated™. That text is also heavily biased towards the state’s view of society, so, y'know, we’re really no closer to understanding how the Egyptians saw themselves as a society. Talking about things like 'god-kings’ is redundant for a text like this, as 'god-kings’ are a 1000 year old relic by the time these strikes occurred. The workers striking wouldn’t have thought of Ramesses III as a god they had to please. If people know anything about the Ancient World at all, outside of NatGeo/History Channel documentaries, they’d know that any text we read has to be taken with a side eye towards potential bias, and that ancient societies are not homogenous little 'we love the king and doing hard work for him’ parties. Propagandistic bias is present in all texts written for the King, which you’d think would be super effective, until you remember that 98% of people can’t read so these texts have no effect on their lives.
The article cited, and quoted, is wrong on a number of accounts. The workers don’t block entry to the Valley of the Kings. What they do is go and do sit ins in the mortuary temples of various kings. Here’s a list of places they protest based on the names within the papyrus:
- Deir el Medina
- Medinet Habu
- Dsr-xprw-ra stp-n-ra (the Mortuary temple of Horemheb, now destroyed)
- They pass the '5 walls of the necropolis’. The article misunderstands these as literal walls, but they’re actually watch towers for the Medjay that surround the area.
- Mansion of Mn-xpr-re (Mortuary temple of Thutmosis III)
- 'Spending the night at the necropolis’ is basically sitting in the VotK
- Temple of Usermaatre Setepenre (The Ramesseum or Mortuary temple of Ramesses II)
- ‘fortress of the necropolis’ which could be anywhere, we don’t have a definite location for this
- The Harbour
- Temple of bA-n-ra mry-imn (Mortuary temple of Merenptah)
- temple of Mn-maAt-re (Seti I’s mortuary temple)
So, it’s quite clear they’re not blocking the Valley of the Kings. They’re sitting in the mortuary temples of previous kings. This prevents offerings being given to those kings, which the article says but misinterprets it as 'they need to go to the tombs’ and they don’t. Mortuary temples, because king’s tombs were sealed unlike most people’s tombs, function as the place to sustain the Ka’s of the previous Kings. It’s a ballsy move. The comment about the 'threatened to destroy a tomb’ is the complex idiom I mentioned before, and it cannot be definitely said to mean that.
What follows in the quoted section is, to put it nicely, quite romanticised and more than a little a fantastical. I wouldn’t even remotely say the relationship 'changed’, because you’d have to prove that no strikes occurred before this point and you can’t. It also flies against the point that was already trying to be made; that workers aren’t 'happy little people who love their god king’. This event didn’t change that much in Egyptian history. The Egyptian people already knew their local governments were useless and would have to take matters into their own hands. They were already robbing tombs to be able to buy more food because the economic situation was so dire. These aren’t the actions of people who think their government is competent. I’ve no idea why Ma'at is brought up here. Ma'at is 'cosmic order’ and it was King’s job to maintain a balance in the world to make sure everything was done correctly; this much is true. However, that’s a very myopic view of things. The people would already have long been aware that 99% of this management was delegated to various officials and not the responsibility of the King. These events also take place after the Amarna Period, in which Akhenaten very much messed up the governance of the country and people’s trust in the royal institution. Their 'belief’ in the King is already long dead, and these strikes didn’t do anything further to that.
The whole quoted last paragraph is funny. Starts romanticising about how this inspired further strikes and then says 'there are no other extant examples’, which is academic speak for 'we don’t have any other examples of this’. Really cool of these workers to inspire strikes which we have no evidence for. Did other strikes likely occur? Of course. Did the strikes in the TSP inspire them? Doubt.jpg. Ramesses III is already the latter part of the New Kingdom because there’s only around a century between him and the end of the New Kingdom but we end with Ramesses XI. That should tell you something about how bad the economic situation was at the time…and how old all Ramesess II’s children were.
Sorry for the long post, but this is my trap card lmao
Sources:
Edgerton, W. 1951, The Strikes in Ramses III’s Twenty-Ninth Year. JEA 10. 137-145
Frandsen J. 1990, 'Editing Reality: The Turin Strike Papyrus’, in S. Israelit-Groll (ed.), Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim
Gardiner, A. 1948, Ramesside Administrative Documents. Oxford. OUP.
