Wishing You a Happy Labor Day

No longer working for the Three Initial Company has an unexpected occupational hazard: I forget when Labor Day is.

Fortunately, a post this week reminded me it was coming up. And then, as reminders often do, it jogged my memory about a previous post that was much more interesting than having a day off work: what was it like to actually work in ancient Egypt?

So I dug it out of the archives, dusted off the sand, and decided it was time for an update.

Turns out working in ancient Egypt was not quite as grim as popular movies and books suggest. And no, enslaved people didn't build the pyramids. That's one of those ideas Hollywood has been remarkably reluctant to give up.

At Deir el-Medina, the village of artisans who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the surviving records offer an unexpectedly detailed look into their working lives.

Workers received food rations, housing, and generally worked eight days, followed by two days off. These weren't impoverished unskilled laborers. They were highly valued, specialized state employees entrusted with the creation of Pharaoh's tomb, which secured their eternal life, divine status, and safe passage to the afterlife.

Some examples of skilled craftsmen in Egypt were sculptors, goldsmiths, painters, carpenters, and rock cutters.

Give one loaf to your laborer, receive two from (the work of) his arms.

Give one loaf to the one who labors, give two to the one who gives orders.

The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq

While not as bad as expected, working in Ancient Egypt was no cruise up the Nile either.

During the reign of Ramesses III, the workers even went on strike — the first recorded labor strike in history — when their wages, paid largely in grain, repeatedly failed to arrive.

Egypt was having economic problems. Years of warfare, including costly battles against the mysterious Sea Peoples, had strained the treasury. Trade had suffered. Harvests were poor. Corruption didn't help. Meanwhile, the government still had monuments to build and a lavish royal jubilee to prepare for.

The workers, however, wanted to be paid.

The surviving papyrus records complaints, such as:

We're hungry.

We received no clothing or fish or vegetables.

Write to Pharaoh. 

They staged sit-ins at royal mortuary temples. When officials found some food and got them back to work, the underlying financial/supply problem remained, and the late-payment/strike cycle repeated.

Ancient Egyptian labor action suddenly sounds remarkably recognizable.

One significant difference between working then and now was job mobility — or the lack of it. Occupations often ran in families, with sons learning their fathers' trades. A farmer's son was likely to become a farmer; a craftsman's son, a craftsman. Your career path was generally determined less by what you wanted to be when you grew up than by the family you happened to be born into.

It's that human side of ancient Egypt — the people behind the monuments — that I love researching and that inevitably finds its way into my fiction, including Reeds of Time.

So this Labor Day, spare a thought for the workers of ancient Egypt. They worked, complained about management, worried about getting paid, and, when things got bad enough, walked off the job.

Some things really haven't changed in 3,000 years.