Kemet Beyond the Pyramids · Episode 5

The Women of Deir el-Medina

The men cut the royal tombs. The women kept the village alive, and left more traces than anyone expected.

Ashraf Osman · اقرأ بالعربية

On the west bank of the Nile at Luxor, in a dry valley behind the hills, lie the stone foundations of a small walled village. For more than four hundred years, from around 1500 to 1080 BCE, this was home to the craftsmen who cut and painted the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.^[1]

We know an unusual amount about the people who lived there, because they wrote everything down. Thousands of notes, letters, lists and drawings survive on flakes of limestone and broken pottery, called ostraca. Many people in the village, women among them, could at least read.^[1] And so, for once, the women of an ordinary Egyptian community are not silent.

Mistress of the house

A married woman at Deir el-Medina carried the title nebet per, "mistress of the house." It was not a polite phrase. It described a job.

Each house was a narrow strip of rooms opening onto the street. In them, women raised children, baked the family's bread and supervised the brewing of beer.^[1] Remember from Episode 4 that the men were paid in raw grain: sacks of emmer and barley. Turning those sacks into food was the women's work, and it began every morning with grinding.

The men's wages arrived as grain. Women turned them into a living.

Help from the state

Grinding grain by hand on a stone takes hours a day. The state recognised this. Along with the grain, it assigned servants to the village to help with grinding and washing clothes.^[1] It was one of the things the tomb-builders received for their work, alongside the grain itself.

Recorded in the work register

The tomb-builders' attendance was checked every day, and the scribes wrote down why a man was missing. One register from the reign of Ramesses II, now in the British Museum, lists forty workmen over almost a year. Alongside "the scorpion stung him" and "eye trouble," it records men who stayed home because a woman in the house was menstruating:^[2]

Ten workers on this list gave that reason. It did not happen every month, so it was probably accepted when a wife or daughter could not do her usual work, and someone had to take it over.^[2] It is a small line in a list, but it tells us how much the household depended on her.

Women who owned things

Egyptian women could own, buy, sell and inherit property, and take a case to the local court. At Deir el-Medina a wife was entitled to a third of what the couple acquired during the marriage.^[1]

The clearest example is a woman called Naunakhte. Around 1145 BCE, in the reign of Ramesses V, she stood before witnesses to make her will. She had eight children. Five of them, she said, had looked after her in her old age, and they would share her property. One son even received an extra bronze bowl. The other three had not supported her, and she left them nothing of her own.^[3]

Her will still exists, on papyrus, in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.^[3]

The wise woman

When something went wrong that nobody could explain, villagers could go to the ta rekhet, "the wise woman." One surviving letter, after two baby boys died, asks a woman why she has not yet consulted the wise woman to learn whether the deaths were fate, or which god was responsible.^[4] The letter does not name her. It seems everyone already knew who she was.

Weaving, and a warning

Women also spun and wove linen, and cloth was valuable enough to be used as payment. We know this partly from a complaint. In a long letter of accusations, a workman charged the foreman Paneb with many abuses, among them forcing the workmen's wives to weave clothing for him.^[5] Their labour was worth stealing.

• ~1500 BCEThe village is founded in the reign of Thutmose I.
• ~1250 BCEA register records absences for wives' and daughters' menstruation.
• ~1145 BCENaunakhte makes her will.
• ~1080 BCEThe village is abandoned.
• 1928Naunakhte's will is found by the French Institute.^[3]

None of these women was a queen. None has a statue in a museum hall. But through grain lists, letters and one stubborn will, we can still hear them: running households, owning property, deciding who deserved it, and holding a village together while the men worked on the kings' eternity.

They are exactly the kind of women the series The Women History Forgot was written for.

Ashraf Osman writes about ancient Egypt for everyone who loves it, starting with children and young adults. His books for young readers tell Egyptian history from a human point of view, so readers live the experience instead of memorising dates. This is episode 5 of Kemet Beyond the Pyramids.