![]() Pay's lament is not surprising: blindness would have completely incapacitated a draftsman, who painted the figures and hieroglyphs inside the tombs. Look to it! Am I not your father? Now, I am wretched I am searching for my sight and it is not there. May you bring me some honey for my eyes, and also some ocher which is made into bricks again, and real black eye paint. Do not c weeping for me, because I am in the my lord Amon his back on me. The draftsman Pay says to his son the draftsman Pre: Do not turn your back on me I am not well. In one such missive, a father, Pay, writes to his son about his eye disease-apparently one of the hazards of tomb building because of the dust, bad lighting and fllying splinters of stone associated with the task: ![]() The most intriguing texts are perhaps the personal letters, which take the reader straight into the world of New Kingdom Egypt. Many are purely practical: receipts for purchases or records of legal battles (the villagers were avid litigators). The residents private jottings are even more varied. As the large number of administrative documents suggests, the Egyptians of this period were obsessive bureaucrats, keeping careful records of the tools issued to the men laboring on the tombs, the rations delivered to the gang, the overall progress of the work and almost every other detail that could be quantified. The ostraca illuminate how the villagers achieved such an impressive level of education.īEFORE WE LOOK more closely at the educational system in Deir el-Medina, however, a quick survey of some of the recovered ostraca will help reconstruct life in the village and the context in which this extraordinary rate of literacy developed. Women in the village did exchange letters, but they may have dictated their thoughts to men.) This high literacy rate stands in stark contrast to the situation throughout the rest of ancient Egyptian society, which during the New Kingdom period had a total literacy rate hovering around only 1 or 2 percent. (Scholars do not know whether many women in Deir el-Medina were literate. The wealth of texts from the site suggests that in some periods of its history, most men in the town could read and write. The documents also offer some insight into the education system of ancient Egypt-a topic I have investigated at length. ![]() In them, one finds government records, love poems and private letters describing family strife, health concerns and legal disputes. These writings bring the villagers to life. Some of the texts are on sheets of papyrus, but most are on shards of pottery or smooth, white fllakes of limestone, known as ostraca, that served as a sort of scrap paper for the community. And across the entire site but especially in the towns garbage dumps, researchers recovered tens of thousands of written documents, most of them dating from the period between 12 B.C.E. Archaeologists in the first half of this century found a wealth of religious monuments and household possessions among the effects, as well as intact tombs containing coffins, furniture and clothing. Lying in an arid and relatively isolated region, the site remains remarkably well preserved: houses and chapels are still standing to a height of up to two meters in some places. This is the village now called Deir el-Medina, the home of the craftsmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. On the westernmost edge of the sprawling ancient city, however, the remains of one small community escaped the general disintegration. Daily life is less well documented because, unlike the stone monuments we see today, the majority of homes, which were made of sun-dried brick, have succumbed to the damp of the flloodplain, along with the furnishings and any written material that would have documented the lives of the literate few. Hundreds of private tombs, some of them magnificently painted, also dot the landscape along the base of the cliffs on the Nile's west bank.Īlthough some of the paintings in the private monuments preserve tantalizing pictures of the luxurious life of the nobility, on the whole, the remaining temples and tombs tell us more about religious experience and beliefs concerning the afterworld than about the experiences of the living. The nearby Valley of the Kings, on the west bank of the Nile, contains some 60 tombs, including that of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. The massive temple complexes of Karnak and Luxor were built during this time, and the two monuments still dominate the east bank of the Nile in the modern city, now called Luxor. During the period known as the New Kingdom (1539–1075 B.C.E.), Egypts southern capital city of Thebes developed into one of the great urban centers of the ancient world.
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