DEIR EL MEDINA
After illustrating the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings and Queens, one wonders who built them with such skill: obviously it could not have been the same people who built the great monuments of Giza for both chronological and location reasons. In fact, the pyramids are located in northern Egypt and date to about the 3rd millennium B.C., while the royal tombs of the Thebaid were built in the south of the country from the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C. onward.
Who then were the builders of the royal tombs ?
The excellent workmen, quarrymen, architects, craftsmen, stonemasons, porters, painters, sculptors, scribes, and all those who participated in the construction of the royal necropolis were inhabitants of Deir El-Medina, a village located just between the two valleys, in the Thebaid, on the west bank of the Nile.
Founded at the beginning of the New Kingdom by Thutmosi I and abandoned after the reign of Ramesses XI, the last builder of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Deir El-Medina is one of the few examples of an Ancient Egyptian urban agglomeration in which the stratification of successive epochs of occupation is absent, so it represents a valuable and valuable record of social life during the New Kingdom. Indeed, from the written records and the numerous depictions found at the site, we have a detailed picture of the community that lived there: we know the names of the inhabitants, the events, the festivals, the type of food, the work accounts, the beliefs, the customs, in short, every aspect of their lives.
The village was known as the "Place of Truth," while the present Arabic name dates back to the Coptic period, when a convent was built there and "Deir el-Medina" means precisely "The Convent of the City."
It was B. Drovetti, from Piedmont, who identified the site of Deir El-Medina between 1811 and 1815. Later, in 1904 E. Schiaparelli, director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, launched an excavation campaign and discovered, among many other things, the intact tomb of the architect Kha, which has provided numerous insights into the social and labor organization of the village and is now on display in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, complete with all the funerary furnishings.
How was the village of Deir el-Medina organized ?
The village was enclosed by a wall and had a complete plan and urbanization whose houses were of similar size and interior layout. Each house, usually single-story, measured about 70 square meters and consisted of 4-6 rooms. The oldest houses, dating back to the 18th dynasty, were built with mud bricks mixed with straw and had no foundations so they collapsed over time, while of the later ones, from the 19th and 20th dynasties, the floor plan and foundations remain today.
The inhabitants of Deir El-Medina worshipped Queen Ahmes-Nefertari and her son Amenophis I, two rulers of the 18th Dynasty, who were considered the patrons of the village, while the serpent goddess Merseger was worshipped as protector, but also as judge and relentless punisher.
Life in Deir El-Medina was organized according to very specific roles: the women took care of the house, food and every domestic task, while the men worked in the construction of the royal tombs. They were divided into teams, each consisting of about 50 people, divided into two groups, the Right and the Left, indicating that one group worked on the right side and the other on the left side of the tomb. Each team, which was salaried by Pharaoh with food supplies, was headed by a foreman and a scribe, called the "Tomb Scribe", noted the working days and the progress of the work. The work week was 8 days, at the end of which there were 2 days of rest when they returned to the village: a "modern" work organization then, in which the workers were not enslaved.
This type of administration turned out to be efficient until the reign of Ramesses III (19th dynasty) when, in the year 29, there was the first strike, perhaps in history, of which we are informed by the "Papyrus of the Strike," written by the scribe Amennakht, and now preserved in the Egyptian museum in Turin, in which we read:
"... 20 days have passed and the rations have not yet been delivered to us...we are weak and hungry, for we have not been delivered the rations... we have come because of hunger and thirst. We have no clothes. Inform the king, our good lord, the vizier, our superior, that we may be given food for our sustenance..."
The fact that the workers's pay consisted of food made the protest even more bitter so the workers after 20 days of waiting went on strike and protest at the temple of Horemheb demanding 46 sacks of grain which were given to them. One more testimony to how resolute and relevant the ancient Egyptian civilization was already in the 1st millennium B.C.E.
