Deir el-Medina - Ancient Egyptian Workmen's Village

Have you heard of Deir el-Medina? Many of us find the history of Ancient Egypt fascinating, with its fabulous golden treasures, pyramids, magnificent temples, pharaohs and gods with the heads of animals and birds. But how much do you know about the lives of the ordinary Ancient Egyptians? Luckily, unlike many ancient cultures, a great deal is known about the daily lives of the workers and their families of ancient Egypt, and much of this knowledge comes from a very unique site called Deir el-Medina. The name Deir el-Medina means ‘monastery of the city’ in Arabic, but to the Ancient Egyptians it was known as ‘Pa-demi’ which means ‘the town’ and also ‘Set-Maat’, the place of truth. So what is this very important and unique archaeological site? Well Deir el-Medina is the remains of the village where the workmen who worked on the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens lived with their wives and children. These highly skilled craftsmen dedicated their whole lives to carving and decorating the tombs of the great pharaohs, and, contrary to what a lot of people believe, they were free citizens and not slaves.

Deir el-Medina is situated in an arid, desiccated little curve in the hills on the west bank of the River Nile at Thebes, which is now modern-day Luxor. Like many ancient sites and monuments, the village of Deir el-Medina had become lost in the sands of time. There were several finds of artefacts and papyri discovered in the general vicinity of the workmen’s village during the 19^th century, but the first major excavations of Deir el-medina were undertaken by Ernesto Schiaparelli in the years 1905-1909, during which he discovered large amounts of ostraca, which are large flakes of limestone that were used for writing on. It is these ostraca that have given us such a vivid picture of the lives of these ordinary people of Deir el-Medina during the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, as they contained notes, lists, and private letters that cover everything from official business to complaints and local gossip. A French team led by Bernard Bruyère took over in 1922 and worked on excavating the whole site of Deir el-Medina until 1951, and uncovered the village with its adjacent cemetery and dumps. They uncovered a village of worker’s dwellings that opened out onto one main thoroughfare that cut through the middle of Deir el-Medina, with several smaller streets that had been added on as the town had grown. Deir el-Medina was a walled village, with the main entrance being to the north, and the well that provided the village with water was just outside the main gate. The well was not fed by a water source, but had to be filled every day by water carriers who hauled the precious water all the way from the Nile.

The dwellings at Deir el-Medina are simple constructions, and the very first houses were made of mud brick and were built without foundations.  The houses evolved over time and they generally had rubble foundations and four rooms with a brick or stone basement. The houses in this ancient village had an entrance hall, a living room with raised mud-brick platforms for seating and sleeping, maybe a couple of small rooms leading off the living area for storage or for use as sleeping quarters for the women folk, and a small open courtyard for cooking and grinding grain in order to bake bread. Some of the houses were decorated with frescos of the gods, and many had niches for stela, statues or offering tables. There were even some child burials found underneath the floors. Deir el-Medina is probably the best preserved ancient settlement in Egypt dating from pharaonic times, and provides a fascinating insight into the daily lives of this unique community.

The workman's village of Deir el-Medina first came into being during the 18^th dynasty, probably during the reign of Amenhotep I, although the first dated remains to have been found come from the reign of Thutmosis I. Amenhotep came to the throne of Egypt as a young child and his mother Queen Ahmose-Nefertari was his co-regent until he was old enough to rule on his own. This royal pair was adopted as the patrons of the worker’s village at Deir el-Medina and after their death they then became the village deities, and there is a temple dedicated to them in the vicinity of the village that stands on the terrace above the much later Ptolemaic temple. There were many feast days during the year in which Amenhotep I’s statue, in his guise of ‘Lord of the Village’ was paraded through the streets of Deir el-Medina, and their joint royal cult was known to be in existence until the late Ramesside period. The community of Deir el-Medina was formed from the workmen and their families. They were highly skilled artisans who were better paid and more highly educated than many other ordinary ancient Egyptians. It is likely that even some of the women were literate, as they were known to have received and been sent messages, as for much of the time only the women would have been at home in Deir el-Medina, as their men folk worked long hours in the Valley of the Kings and sometimes were away overnight.

There were generally around 100 people living at Deir el-Medina, and the workmen were divided into two gangs, the Left Side and the Right Side. These two gangs worked under the supervision of two foremen, and all the work undertaken by the gangs was under the administration of the vizier at the court of the pharaoh. The gangs were made up of stone masons, draughtsmen, carpenters and sculptors and would work for many years cutting out just one royal tomb from the cliffs and then executing the intricate wall paintings or fine carvings. Money was unknown in ancient Egypt, so the workers were paid with grain for grinding into flour and barley for making beer, along with pottery, fish, vegetables and wood for the cooking fires. There were also scribes who kept records of the progress of the work on the royal tomb, payments to the workers and any supplies that were distributed. It was these scribes and the foremen who acted as the heads of the village, and they were responsible for running the local courts, distributing the worker’s wages and obtaining supplies for the work on the tombs from the royal storehouses. They were also responsible for filling any vacancies in the workforce, and there is evidence that bribes were used to obtain a job in this select enclave of elite royal workers. These were prized jobs in Ancient Egypt, and they were passed down from father to son. The working week for these ancient workmen was eight days long, followed by two days holidays.  There were also festival days to be enjoyed during the year and the records show that time was also taken off for illness, and also hangovers and for settling family rows. In their time off the workmen produced superb funerary equipment to supplement their incomes and also dug out their own rock tombs and decorated them with some of the finest tomb paintings known from ancient Egypt.

As long as the pharaoh’s were having tombs cut in the Valley of the Kings, the village thrived, but towards the end of the New Kingdom the Egyptian Empire became under threat from foreign invaders which led to economic instability and a scarcity of food and goods. The inhabitants of Deir el-Medina were totally dependent on receiving their payments of food from the outside, and when the delivery of these supplies started to become irregular they became restless. Towards the end of the reign of Ramesses III, they downed tools in exasperation and staged perhaps the first strike in history. They wrote to the vizier stating their grievances and protesting that they were hungry, and refused to return to work. The royal authorities addressed their concerns and resumed their supplies of rations, but other strikes were to follow. Things became gradually more unsettled at Deir el-Medina, with disruptions to the grain supplies and strikes becoming commonplace, and raiders from Libya threatening the area around Thebes. It was around this time that tomb robbing became a pastime for the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina, and gangs were formed that would tunnel into the pharaoh’s tombs to loot the gold and rich funerary equipment that they knew had been placed there to aid the pharaoh’s journey into the afterlife. Even the officials were implicated and although there were arrests, torture and executions, the looting continued and it seemed that the Egyptian authorities were powerless to completely stop the gangs. Thebes itself was plunged into civil war and the workers left Deir el-Medina to take sanctuary in the temple of Medinet Habu, but even there they were not safe and the temple was overrun and the unfortunate workers and their families were captured and enslaved.

Eventually, in a frantic attempt to protect the mummies and funerary goods of the pharaohs and their queens, the High Priests of Amun, who were by now the effective rulers of Egypt, emptied the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens of their precious contents and created two royal caches were they hoped that their rulers could rest in peace for the rest of eternity. The days of the skilled craftsmen carving royal tombs and living at Deir el-Medina were over, and the future pharaohs of ancient Egypt would be buried much further north in the Delta. The Valley of the Kings would receive no further royal burials and the village at Deir el-Medina was abandoned forever. The last ancient Egyptians to live in the vicinity of Deir el-Medina would have been the priests who served the temple of Hathor that was built during the Ptolemaic period, and by then the story of the lives of these remarkable workmen and their families would have already been a very dim and distant memory.

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