What Did Ancient Egyptians Actually Do All Day

In 1157 BC, the best-fed specialists in Egypt sat down behind a dead king's temple and refused to work until someone fed them. That's the first recorded labor strike in history, and it's written on Papyrus Turin Cat. 1880, now in the Museo Egizio in Turin. We follow the crew of Deir el-Medina, the walled village near Luxor excavated by Bernard Bruyère from 1922 to 1951, through more than ten thousand ostraca translated by Jaroslav Černý: absence logs citing scorpion bites and drunkenness, ration records paid in bread and beer, an eight-day workweek, and the scribe Kenherkhepeshef, whose household archive gives us a dream book, a woman's will, and accusations of tomb robbery against a foreman named Paneb. We also cross the Nile to Giza, where Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass's excavations and a bioarchaeological study led by Azza Sarry El-Din complicate Herodotus's famous claim about the pyramid builders. The popular image, chains and whips under a pharaoh's lash, comes largely from Herodotus writing centuries after the fact, and from Hollywood epics like The Ten Commandments. The paperwork tells a different story, one of rations, rest days, sick notes, and workplace disputes. What exactly made these state-employed specialists finally walk off the job in Year Twenty-nine of Ramesses the Third, and what, if anything, fixed it? CHAPTERS 0:00 We Are Hungry 1:36 The Place of Truth 3:10 Ten Thousand Broken Receipts 5:06 The Scribe's Private Archive 6:49 Sick Notes for Scorpions 8:38 A Neighborhood, Not a Tomb 9:56 The First Recorded Strike 11:42 Marching on the Mayor 13:00 A Volcano in Iceland 14:36 Bones That Healed 16:53 What They Actually Did 17:59 Board Games and Love Poems 20:09 Dreams Marked in Red 22:19 The Foreman Who Robbed Tombs 23:21 A Statue That Judges 25:06 Saved by the Garbage SOURCES Herodotus. Histories, Book 2, 124–125 (5th century BC) [the skeptical, secondhand origin of the slave-labor myth] Edgerton, W.F. 1951. The Strikes in Ramses III's Twenty-Ninth Year. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 10(3): 137–145. Černý, J. 1973. A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside Period. Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale. McDowell, A.G. 1999. Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs. Oxford University Press. Sarry El-Din, A. et al. 1998. Bioarchaeological Study of the Human Skeletal Remains at Giza (preliminary report). Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte. If you worked at Deir el-Medina and got paid in bread, beer and fish instead of money, what excuse would you have written on your ostracon to skip a shift? Subscribe for a new strange civilization every week:    / @weirderthanhistory   All footage and photographs in this video are real: archaeological film, museum photos and maps. No AI-generated pictures or video. #AncientHistory #AncientEgypt #WeirderThanHistory