From antiquity we mostly know the people who gave orders. The names that survive are those of whoever commissioned the works, and what survives in writing is usually what they wanted written. About the people who did the work, almost nothing is usually known.
There is one remarkable exception and it is on Luxor's west bank, in a hollow of the desert between the mountain and the cultivation. It is called Deir el-Medina and it was the village where the artisans who cut and decorated the royal tombs lived. Not only does the village survive: its paperwork survives.
01 Sixty-eight houses in a hollow of the desert
The village covers 5,600 square metres and came to have around 68 dwellings, averaging 70 square metres each. It is walled and laid out in one go: it did not grow, it was planned.
The first datable remains belong to the reign of Thutmose I, around 1506–1493 BC, and the village was abandoned around 1110–1080, under Ramesses XI. That is, it was inhabited for some four centuries, and throughout that time it had a single function.
The population was not homogeneous. The remains and texts indicate a mixture of Egyptians, Nubians and Asiatics, which fits what it was: a body of specialists recruited wherever necessary, not a farming community.
02 Five thousand written potsherds
What makes this site exceptional is not the houses: it is what was thrown down the well. Beside the village a deposit turned up with some 5,000 ostraca, fragments of pottery and limestone used as a surface for writing whatever did not merit papyrus.
And that is exactly what makes them valuable. Nobody writes on an ostracon for posterity: you jot down grain deliveries, tool lists, debts between neighbours, who missed work and why. It is a community's administrative record, not its official version.
The volume keeps growing in importance because not all of it has been studied: thousands of papyri and ostraca from the village remain unpublished. The major excavations were carried out by Ernesto Schiaparelli, between 1905 and 1909, and Bernard Bruyère, between 1922 and 1951.
03 Eight days of work and two off
From those texts comes a reconstruction of the working regime that exists for almost no other ancient project. The week was eight days of work followed by two off, and the workers slept in huts beside the work area during the working stretch.
The annual tally is more surprising. During the reign of Merneptah, around 1213–1203 BC, the records give more than a third of the year without work, counting rest days and festivals. This was not a squeezed gang: it was qualified and scarce personnel.
The wages confirm it. They were paid around three times a field labourer's rate, and in rations, as state employees. Grain was the currency, and that is where what happened next comes from.
04 And a strike in year 25 of Ramesses III
Around year 25 of the reign of Ramesses III, about 1170 BC, the wheat rations started arriving late. The village's workers stopped working and refused to return until their grievances were addressed.
The episode is documented in the village's own texts and is considered the first recorded sit-down strike in history. It is not a curiosity: it is proof that there was a regular payment system, a calendar and an expectation that could be broken.
What is notable, from a traveller's point of view, is that this labour dispute of three thousand two hundred years ago is known in detail, while hardly any medieval cathedral builder, far closer in time, is known at all.
05 The tomb-cutters had tombs of their own
There is a detail that closes the circle. The artisans of Deir el-Medina built themselves tombs cut into the slope beside the village, with rock-cut chapels and small pyramids above, and they decorated them themselves.
The result is that some of the best-preserved and finest decoration on the whole west bank is not in the royal tombs but in the workers'. They worked with the same craft and, on their own job, with no deadline and no supervisor.
It is the piece that turns the site into more than an industrial dormitory. The village, the well with the ostraca and the artisans' own tombs form a complete set: where they lived, how they were paid and what they could do.
06 How to look at it
The first practical consequence is that it pays to arrive with the scale in mind. Five thousand six hundred square metres is small: the whole village is walked in a short time, and what you see is low walls, narrow streets and the plan of the houses. There is no spectacle, there is a document.
The second is that it is worth seeing after the Valley of the Kings rather than before. With the tombs already seen, the village stops being a heap of stones and becomes the place the people who made them set out from each morning, half an hour away over the mountain.
And the third is the one that changes how you see the whole west bank. What is in those tombs was not made by an abstraction: it was made by a couple of hundred people who lived in sixty-eight houses, were paid in grain, missed work and wrote it down, and who once downed tools because the wheat was late.
