Part One: The First Labor Strike: How the Tomb Builders of Deir El-Medina Started It All

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to cool people who
did cool stuff. You're a reminder that as long as
there has been labor, there have been labor strikes. As
long as there's been wage theft, there's been road blockades,
and as long as there have been bosses stealing from workers,

(00:21):
there have been workers stealing from bosses. I am your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and this week we are going back the
farthest we've ever gone. Well, okay, almost the farthest. We
did do an episode about the domestication of dogs and
why dogs are great, and that one goes back even further,
but this one goes as far back into the written

(00:43):
record as it is possible to go, because this week
we're going to talk about the first labor strikes that
we know about in history, the first ones that were
ever written down. And with me is my guest. You
you're my guest, So I invite you to speak aloud
while listening to this. Interrupt me. Ask any questions that

(01:05):
you have just wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this.
I won't hear them, but it's entertaining to me to
imagine you all doing that. There's no guests. This week.
This is one of those ones where I just wanted
to sit down and write this and get it out.
So that's what I'm doing. Just like humanity, the labor
movement was born in Africa, which shouldn't surprise anybody specifically.

(01:30):
Now we're going to talk about this as the first
labor strike. I actually going to make an argument that
this is the first labor strike that we know about
because it was written down and there's actually a decent
reason to suppose that this was common elsewhere, because okay,
well we'll get to it anyway, this is the first
one we know about. The first strike happened in Egypt.
It happened on November fourteenth, eleven fifty two BCE. That

(01:55):
is more than three thousand years ago for those of
you keeping track at home. It happened in a town
of skilled workers who built the tombs for the Pharaohs,
a town called Dierra al Medina, which fortunately for us,
is one of the best preserved ancient towns in the world.
In this case, the town was preserved because it was
far enough back from the Nile that it didn't flood.

(02:17):
People were building their houses with earth with mud, they
would say, right, and so millennia. Flooding destroyed anything that
the river could reach, but it couldn't reach here. And
so when I say best preserved, it's not like you whatever.
You can see pictures of it. It's like not totally there,
but it's not not there. You know, it's doing pretty
good for three thousand years. I'm not going to look
so good three thousand years from now. Although this is

(02:39):
also a story about mummies, so I guess there are
people who look like mummies. I guess three thousand years later.
That's besides the point. I am willing to guess that
if you're not a big egypt fan, and we'll talk
about the complications of ancient egypt fans and Orientalism later,
I'm willing to bet you who grew up being told

(03:01):
the Pyramids were built by slave labor. I grew up
being told that the Pyramids were built by slave labor.
I mean, if you're lucky you got told that versus Aliens.
But I just sort of assumed that any other Egyptian
tomb had been too. But the thing is, slave labor
wasn't involved in any of these things. We tend to

(03:21):
have this flattened, simplified understanding of the past, of the
ancient world, and in order to understand the origins of labor,
of wages, of strikes, of organizing, we're gonna have to
unflatten everything. We're going to have to do context my
favorite thing. But don't worry, it'll be fun. This context
is going to include ancient dream interpretations and it has

(03:45):
grave robbers who were stealing from work, so can't go
wrong with that. All right, we're gonna talk about ancient Egypt.
There is a problem. We're going to talk about it
again at the end when we talk about Orientalism. There
is a problem with the way that people distinguish between
ancient Egypt and modern Egypt as if they are like
completely separate, you know. And it's used basically by the

(04:09):
British to sort of justify stealing all the artifacts and
all that shit, because they're like, oh, it's like a
totally different thing, and it's not. But obviously ancient Egypt,
with hieroglyphics and shit, is different than modern Egypt. We're
gonna talk about ancient Egypt. Egypt has been around for

(04:30):
a really long time. It is more or less the
oldest thing still going that we know of the oldest country.
You could say people have been living there since six
thousand BCE, and the first ruler of the region cropped
up around thirty one hundred BCE, conquering the whole the
Nile River, at least the parts you could take a
boat up. Even ancient Egypt is a sort of meaninglessly

(04:53):
broad phrase. It changed a lot over the millennium. You've
got prehistoric Egypt, that is, you know, before we have
history aka writing, we don't know as much about it.
You've got the three kingdom periods, the Old Kingdom, the
Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. You can probably figure
out which ones came when those kingdoms were relatively stable,

(05:14):
And in between those various kingdoms you have these unstable
periods called the intermediate periods. The Old Kingdom starts about
three hundred years or so after the founding of Egypt,
and it runs from two six eight six BCE to
twenty one eighty one BCE. And don't worry, there is
not a test on these dates at the end. Personally,

(05:37):
I only find actual dates interesting when you can use
them to cross reference stuff and position things in relation
to each other. It's part of why I actually didn't
care much about the way I learned history in school.
It was taught in a way that just flowed right
over me with names and dates. And names and dates
are great, stories are better. They stick in my brain more.
I only care about the names and dates once I

(05:59):
have the story and realize why I should care. In
the Old Kingdom, the pharaohs the king's slash queens the
people who ruled right. They were the head priest, the
commander in chief of the military, and the owner of
all of the lands. They were the ruler of all
the people, and according to some interpretations and not others,

(06:24):
they were the only people who got an afterlife. They
got big old tombs as a result of that, and
most sources say only the Pharaohs got an afterlife, but
I think that might be slightly outdated because in early
twenty ten new tombs of pyramid workers were uncovered and
they had some grave goods. They had jars of beer

(06:44):
and bread buried with them to serve them in the afterlife,
so they probably had an afterlife. Now, Okay, I am
doing an episode, like always, especially when you do the
ancient world, I am doing an episode that is a
thing that people have dedicated centuries to studying, and I'm like,

(07:07):
I read a lot about this really quickly, so you know,
I'm not the world's leading egyptologist, and I also sort
of hate that word, so we'll talk about in the
Orientalism section. Anyway, it was the first pharaoh of the
Old Kingdom who started the whole pyramid thing. Not a

(07:27):
pyramid scheme, just a pyramid to be buried under, although
you could sort of argue that monarchy is a pyramid scheme.
This particular pharaoh, his name was Joseph. He was the
first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, the second pharaoh of
the Third dynasty, and he had a step pyramid built
for himself. The smooth sided pyramids at Giza, like with

(07:49):
the famous big Pyramids, are also from the Old Kingdom,
as is the famous Sphinx. Then you've got the Middle
Kingdom from twenty fifty five BCE to sixteen fifty BCE,
and in that one the upper classes like nobles and
priests and shit started having a lot more of a
say and more independence. And this is really interesting to

(08:11):
me because this is a pattern that we are going
to see replicated later with monarchy in say Europe, you
know where you start off with these like while you
start off with these very kind of low level kings
who are almost coming out of a vaguely democratic thing,
and then they start building up to more and more
centralized power. And then underneath the centralized power you have
like the rich and the rich who aren't necessarily nobility,

(08:35):
start being like, but I want some power, And that's
where all the anti monarchy stuff comes from. Quite unfortunately,
it was a lateral move in which the bourgeoisie took
power from the monarchs, and we're actually better able to
not just centralized power, but exert power, like have power
go further out from the core of their society. So

(08:56):
they were actually better able to fuck up people's lives,
which is why I was a lot to remove. Even
though it seems like it'd be better to have oligarchs
than kings, it turns out it both kind of suck. Anyway.
I just think it's interesting that we'll see patterns just
repeat themselves over and over again throughout civilizations, you know,
thousands and thousands of years ago. So in the Middle Kingdom,
the upper classes, like the nobles and priests started having

(09:18):
more of a say and more independence, and they started
getting fancier burials, and it's this period. Then we started
getting literature from like the Coffin texts, which we'll talk
about later, but their architecture didn't hold up as well
and wasn't as spectacular as the Old Kingdom. Then there's
the New Kingdom from fifteen fifty BCE to ten seventy BCE.

(09:40):
By this point the pharaohs were like, you know what,
we don't actually need whole pyramids. You can just put
us in the valley of kings and big old rock
tombs that are kind of underground. And I don't think
they did this because they were less arrogant than the
kings and queens of old, because plenty of the pharaohs
were women, as we'll get to, not like fifty to fifty,
but a fair number of them. But rather they did

(10:02):
this because grave robbers were organized and persistent, so it
was easier to have a more remote, hidden, underground place
where you could centralize your security. And by the time
we're in the New Kingdom, more and more people wanted
fancy funerals, and the workers who built all their tombs
were in fact free people inasmuch as anyone was free.

(10:26):
But before we talk about them. We should talk about
people who aren't free, But do you know what, before
we talk about even that, we should talk about the
products and services that support the show. And we're back

(10:49):
when I say that the people who built the pyramids
and the tombs were free people, and as much as
anyone was free, this is not to say that Egypt
didn't have slavery. If you've been listening to the show
for a lot, especially in the past years I've explored
the ancient world, you're likely tired of hearing me say, well,
they had slavery. But it's not like you think. You're

(11:10):
likely tired of hearing me say the racialized chattel slavery
the American South was a unique evil that stands out
in history. But I've got to say both those things
again here. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies, especially Rome,
which honestly kind of matches America. It's not the same
as the American South and how it did slavery. It's
like a different way of doing it, but it was

(11:30):
like fucking bad anyway. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies.
Their economies were built on slavery. Rome, in particular, required
a state of constant war to continue to enslave more
and more people to work the fields and the mines
and the houses of the wealthy. Slavery has been found
all over the world across millennia, though was also far

(11:52):
from universally practiced. Anyone who tries to sell you on
a simple idea of what non civilized people did versus
what civilized people did is trying to sell you on
this or that ideology built an outdated anthropology. See the
book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David
Wengrow the Davids, as we like to call them in
this household for more about that. But basically, some groups

(12:18):
of people did slavery and some groups didn't, and even
those societies that practiced slavery did so wildly different from
one another. The slavery of the Ottoman Empire, where civil
servants and bureaucrats were owned by the empire itself, was
entirely different from the American South with its famous racialized
chattel slavery, which was entirely different from the serfdom common

(12:39):
across medieval Europe and Renaissance Russia, where peasants were considered
part of the property of the land and lived comparatively
free lives, but were not free to travel or kind
of self determine their lives. And even those descriptions are
over simplifications of complex situations that changed decade to decade
region to region. Ancient Egypt, slavery was I can't even

(13:02):
really say relatively benign because it's slavery, so it wasn't.
But in the scale of unfathomable evil, which gets infinitely deep,
this was still unfathomably evil, just way less unfathomably so
almost fathomably fathomable. Fath of enslave people in Egypt were
like the rest of the ancient world, mostly people who

(13:24):
were captured in warfare, caught doing some crime, or were debtors.
Debtors would choose and I think they get scare quotes
to sell themselves off to cover their debts, which didn't
work out great, I think because at that point your
family and kids are now enslaved too, because it was
a hereditary condition. If your mother was enslaved when you
gave birth to you, you were born in slave too.

(13:47):
But also we see this elsewhere too, But in Egypt,
poor people sometimes sold themselves and therefore their families into slavery,
because being free and broke often starving to death, while
if you were owned, there was someone who was responsible
for you. This doesn't make it good, but in a

(14:08):
world in which everyone is some degree of unfree, many
people chose to enter involuntary servitude rather than starve. It
was for some a method of social mobility. Temples in
particular often owned the people who worked there, and in fact,
sometimes for like a brief period kind of later in

(14:28):
the late BCE, like the Near Ce part of BCE,
a lot of people didn't just sell themselves into slavery.
They paid a monthly fee for the privilege of being enslaved.
Because in ancient Egypt and up until the nineteenth century,
I think I don't know as much about like medieval Egypt,
and it relates to this, it relied heavily on CorV labor,

(14:50):
which is basically labor as tax. You can think of
it as like, ah, I owe the king three sheep
and to two months. I'm making those numbers up. They
have no really to reality. Or you can think of
it like the mandatory military service, only it's for public works.
It's been a while since i've been there, But I
remember in Finland being told, like, you know, when you

(15:10):
turn eighteen you can either do one year in the
military or two years in public service. So but think
of that, only it's not just like once when you
turn eighteen and so kind of recently there's there's still
new things people are learning, finding old papyrieye papyri I
don't know, and translating them. A recent papyrus translation is

(15:30):
a contract that reads quote, I am your servant from
this day onwards, and I shall pay two and a
half copper pieces every month as my slave fee before
sokenebtunis the great God. So that was like the contract
of someone who sold themselves into slavery or paid to
opposite of sold whatever I already covered it. They probably

(15:51):
paid that fee by doing wage labor elsewhere, like a
second gig after their primary job. And they probably did
this to avoid the core vla that was just way
way rougher of a life than being owned by a temple.
This probably wasn't a long standing practice. We only have
evidence of it happening from one ninety BCE to one
thirty BCE, and that's well after the rest of this

(16:14):
week's story. Takes place. I still found it interesting, and
I've been thinking a lot because I've been doing all
of these ancient episodes, I've been thinking a lot about
freedom and how all throughout history up to including the
present day, we're all in some sort of sliding scale
of unfreedom. There's people who've like done a bunch of

(16:34):
time in prison who will talk about the outside world
as minimum security prison because like, you're still being surveilled
and policed, and at any point they can take you
away to the higher security prison. And you know, there's
the whole like, none of us are free until everyone
is free. The fact that our quote unquote freedom is

(16:57):
a thing that could be taken away from us so
easily really indicates that we're not free. Early anti capitalists,
including the formerly enslaved woman Lucy Parsons, refer to wage
labor as wage slavery because your choice was work and
build the wealth of your boss or starve. It always
struck me as an insensitive phrasing, so I tend not

(17:18):
to use wage slavery as a phrasing. But honestly, once
I understood a more expansive look at freedom and unfreedom,
I kind of get it, Like Theoretically, in an idealized
understanding of the world, your boss should never be able
to just talk down to you or treat you as
a lesser because you've made an arrangement with them and

(17:39):
which you freely agree to trade labor for a wage,
you're still peers. Yet in practice, so many bosses treat
their workers like shit. Yell at them, get mad at them,
be like you're don't do the thing right. That's not
how you talk to your peer. Most bosses will treat
subordinates just subordinates in terms of a work structure, but

(18:02):
socially because workers are fundamentally less free than employers in
our society, which believes in the central myth of capitalism
of free associations and contracts between people. Yet that's not
what's happening. There's never been a binary between free and unfree,
and I think it's important to understand that in order
to understand someone who decides to sell themselves and therefore

(18:25):
they're family into the permanent service of someone wealthy in
order to be taken care of. It's like joining the
army or a nunnery, basically saying like, all right, I'm
going to be part of this larger unit that will
take care of me. But I'm going to do it
in a subordinate way because that's my option. I am
not saying that this is a good way to structure society.

(18:46):
I'm saying that this is a way that society has
been into some degree is structured still. People in ancient Egypt,
before they really kind of start hanging out with the Greeks,
who are way into worse slavery, people enslaved in ancient
Egypt could still own property and get married. I read
one source that claims that people could buy their own freedom,
but another sources there's simply no record of that ever happening.

(19:08):
But it was possible for them to kind of advance
up the social ladder without being freed, and many were
freed by their owners. People still escaped, and as we
talked about in episodes about ancient Greece, basically some of
the first international treaties were you have to give your
runaway slaves back. In particular, the first known peace treaty

(19:29):
in history, from the twelfth century BCE, was between Ramses
the Second from Egypt and the Hittites from the Assyrian
Peninsula aka modern Turkey. That treaty included this quote. If
a man or two men who are unknown flee, and
if they escape from the country of Egypt, and if
they don't want to serve him, then Hatusili the great King,

(19:52):
the king of the country of Hati, has to deliver
them into his brother's hands, and he shall not allow
them to inhabit the country of Hati. You got to
give the runaway and slave people back. We talk sometimes
about how the concept of the police force in the
modern sense was largely developed out of slave catcher societies
in the United States, but it's worth understanding that the

(20:14):
development of law, of borders and of international treaties also
develop out of the same urge to hold on to
private property, which for most of the history of civilization
hinged around the ownership of people. Because people create all value,
so owning people is the best way to generate value without,

(20:34):
you know, working. Now we've discovered wage labor, which is
another good way to do it, although they also would
wage labor back then. Whatever, Okay. Maybe the most important
difference though, was that compared to Greece or especially to Rome,
both of which came way later, Egypt's economy didn't run
on slave labor. It was a really complex web of

(20:55):
people who are in some ways free and in other
ways not. Much like I am both free and unfree
when it comes to my job obligations like pivoting to
ads and we're back. Essentially, everyone underneath the pharaoh was

(21:19):
in some condition of being unfree. In ancient Egypt, most
of the peasants were tied to the land they lived on,
much like later serfdom, but this was less of a
legal rule and more of a social rule. People were
born into their jobs. Your dad does a thing, you're
gonna do the thing. And as for those big, massive
infrastructure projects, the one that still stand today, the ones

(21:41):
that people from all over the world are fascinated by,
they weren't built by enslaved people. They are built by
cor v labor and wage labor. The myth of them
being created by slave labor, though, is ancient. We're not
like uniquely foolish. Usually you can blame every misunderstanding of
the past on the Victorians, but sometimes you can blame
it on the Greeks, because it goes back to Herodotus,

(22:02):
a Greek who lived in much more of a slave society.
I think he just made an assumption based on his
own culture. The myth continued to pick up steam in
nineteen seventy seven when former Israeli Prime Minister Menichem Begen
claimed that it was Jews who built the Pyramids, that
they were built by enslaved Israelites, but this was debunked
by another Israelian Israeli archaeologist, Amahai Mazar, who put it bluntly,

(22:26):
quote no Jews built the Pyramids because Jews didn't exist
at the period when the pyramids were built. A German egyptologist,
Dietzer Wildung said about the slave myth to the Guardian, quote,
the world simply could not believe the pyramids were built
without oppression and forced labor, but out of loyalty to
the pharaohs. The pyramids were massive undertakings. Ten thousand workers

(22:51):
worked for more than thirty years on a single one.
They were recruited from poor areas. They worked in three
month shifts. They were well fed and got to eat
meat eat regularly. Most people didn't get to eat meat regularly.
They mostly grain and vegetables, with some fish and rarely
some meat. Best as I can put together, and the
workers who died on site doing this work, they were

(23:13):
buried on site as a sign of respect. Their heads
were pointed west, their feet were pointed east in religious custom,
and they, you know, were buried with bread and with beer.
They also worked really fucking hard and died young. I
personally find that they did it because they loved the Pharaoh.
Thing a little bit hard to swallow. But I might

(23:33):
be wrong, because that's what multiple experts have written and
they know more than me. I'm probably just not thinking
of it in terms of the Egyptian theology properly. But
I've read other things that suggested the Pyramids were built
by core v labor, which again is basically labor as tax,
and even if it were regular wage labor, and someone
knows the answer to this, and I just read multiple

(23:53):
things that contradicted each other. When poor people take back breaking,
seasonal jobs that pay way better than anything else, that's
a tale as old as time, and it's free within
a certain understanding of free. The people who work in
those pop up fracking towns aren't doing it because they
love America, but because it's tremendously difficult, dangerous labor that

(24:17):
pays so much better than other blue collar work. So
that's like where I think about it, but again I'm
probably wrong. However they were built, it wasn't by enslaved people.
The pyramids got built. But that's the Old Kingdom, and
we're going to be talking about the New Kingdom this week.
We're going to be talking about a worker's town near

(24:39):
the Valley of Kings in the Valley of Queens. We
are going to be talking about Deir el Medina. Dierra
el Medina was a whole town built up around workers
who built and filled the tombs of royalty in the
Valley of Kings in the Valley of Queens. The city's name,
the current name that we use for it, is Arabic.
It means the monastery of the city, but it was

(25:01):
known at the time as Podemi the Town, or Setma
the place of Truth. Podemi was probably its informal name,
in Setma was its formal name. I love that it's
the place of truth. That's fucking metal. The famous king
tut Pharaoh tut uncommon was buried there. His tomb is

(25:22):
kind of small as far as pharaoh tombs go. It's
mostly just famous because it was opened by British grave robbers,
the kind of fancy degrees who don't call themselves grave robbers.
In nineteen twenty two, here's what the famous British grave
robber Howard Carter wrote about finding the place quote. At
first I could see nothing. The hot air escaping from

(25:43):
the chamber caused the candle flames to flicker. But presently,
as my eyes grow accustomed to the light, details of
the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals,
statues in gold. Everywhere was the glint of gold for
a moment, an eternity, it must have seemed to the
other standing by. I was dumb with amazement. And when

(26:03):
Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously,
can you see anything? It was all I could do
to get out the words, yes, wonderful things. The royal
seal on the door was found intact. The first three
chambers were unadorned, with evidence of early entrance through one

(26:24):
of the outside walls. The next chamber contained most of
the funery objects. The sarcophagus was four gilded wooden shrines,
one inside the other, within which lay the stone sarcophagus,
three mummiform coffins, the inner one being solid gold, and
then the mummy haste can be seen in the reliefs

(26:45):
and the sarcophagus due to the fact that Tutukanhaman died
at only nineteen years of age, following a brief reign.
Though extremely impressive to the modern world, the treasurers of
Tutucahaman must have paled when compared to the great pharaohs
that ruled for many years during Egypt's Golden Age. And
that's what a grave robber had to say about finding

(27:05):
this place in the Valley of Kings, which only got
unearthed around that time, the whole Valley of Kings, And
we know more about the city that built this than
kind of any other town like it in the ancient world.
I like the way that a write up from Murray
Parsons and toryegypt dot Net put it, and toriegypt Net

(27:26):
is a shockingly up to date and thorough source, although
you know it's also trying to sell you tours. So
the image of hundreds, perhaps thousands of toiling slaves whipped
by overseers seems seared into the modern consciousness, and everyone
is convinced that the despots who ruled Egypt with iron,
greedy fists must have built their wealth and glory on

(27:47):
the bleeding backs of this tortured labor. Nothing can be
farther from the truth, except perhaps that aliens and spaceships
pressed a button and built the Giza Complex and the
other great monuments. The more work being done on these
villages sounds a clear message that while they worked hard,
these villages were made up of mostly free and willing
citizens doing their part to ensure the afterlife of their king.

(28:12):
But here I'm no longer quoting here. I want to
go on a side, me in a side. This is shocking.
You see, whenever I see something called the Valley of
Kings and another thing called the Valley of Queens, I
want to know more. I'm interested in gender. Best as
I can tell, the Valley of Kings was for the pharaohs,

(28:35):
the actual rulers. Most of them were men, but not
nearly as many as you'd assume, and so there's women
buried in the Valley of Kings. The Valley of Queens
was for the non ruling queens, and for the princes,
and for the high ranking people of whatever gender who
just happened not to be the ruler. I spent a
little while trying to figure out if the Valley of

(28:56):
the Kings and Queens were named by the people who
built them, or if that's a modern appellation. But I
didn't find an answer. We straight up don't know how
many pharaohs were women, but we know it's way more
than most people would guess. Sometimes the pharaohs, in order
to be taken seriously, just call themselves men. Other times
history remembers women as queens instead of pharaohs, leaving historians

(29:20):
unsure if they ruled by themselves or if they had
a guy with them. We know that succession could go
to a woman, but it generally preferred men. So like
if you're you know, got two kids, your son gets
it if they're both genders, but if you got two daughters,
gets to a daughter. You know, women were, like a
lot of later monarchies, kind of the last choice to
keep a dynasty going, or a lot of queens would

(29:42):
rule after their husbands died. We know about hot Shepsut,
who has the word she right there in her name.
Well you can't hear it, but it's in the spelling.
She was in charge for fifteen years fourteen seventy three
BCE to fourteen fifty eight BCE. Again, there's no quiz
on these states. She was married to her half brother
Futmost the second, so her infant son inherited the throne,

(30:06):
but she ruled first as the regent, but eventually she
was like, not fuck that kid, I'm in charge. And
she was a war leader and did a bunch of stuff.
And in early depictions of her, she's presented as a woman,
but slowly the art about her starts changing, and in
the sculptures and the engravings, she's wearing men's clothing, and
then eventually she has the beard that pharaohs symbolically wear,

(30:28):
and she starts even going by the masculine version of
her name, Hotshepsu. As soon as she died, her step son,
Thutmouse the third or is I'll call him thot Mouse,
the ungrateful patriarchal asshole, just like erased her name from everything. Okay,
not just as soon as she died, but later in
his reign he starts erasing her name from everything he can.
He tries to erase her from history because he wanted

(30:50):
to legitimize his own son as heir. It probably actually
had nothing to do with gender, or did it. Then
there's Nefertiti, who's famous because the grave robber Ludor Chart
found a bust of her that I'm sure you've seen,
even if you don't realize it. Never Tidy was queen,
not pharaoh, during maybe the most prosperous period of Egypt's history,

(31:10):
and historians like to argue about whether or not she
ruled for a while after her husband died, so she
was like the pharaoh who might have been a pharaoh,
but people argue about whether or not she got to.
Then there's Tawerzette, who was buried in the Valley of
Kings after ruling for a few years after her husband,
the pharaoh died. And then there's Netherkret, who might have
been the first woman to be a pharaoh, though I

(31:33):
read really contradictory sources about her. Some say that all
the records called her a man, Some say that she
probably never existed. Others says she definitely existed and might
not have ruled whatever. But I really like the story
about her. The famously often incorrect ancient Greek Herodotus, the
one who was wrong about a thing in the past.
Earlier in this story, he has a wild story about

(31:54):
netherket In that tale, she came to the throne after
an angry mob killed her brother and her on the
throne instead. But she wasn't happy, She wasn't grateful, She
wasn't happy that people killed her brother. So, to quote Herodotus,
determined to avenge his death, she devised a cunning scheme
by which she destroyed a vast number of Egyptians. She
constructed a spacious underground chamber, and on the pretense of

(32:18):
inaugurating it through a banquet, inviting all those whom she
knew to have been responsible for the murder of her brother, suddenly,
as they were feasting, she let the river in upon
them by means of a large secret duct. And then
later in that story, she kills herself by running into
a burning room. The past is so metal. Then, of

(32:41):
course there's the most famous woman Pharaoh, Cleopatra. She's famous
mostly because she came really late on the scene when
the Romans were doing their thing, and actually, you know,
eventually the Romans take over whatever. Okay, But she was
Cleopatra the seventh, which means that there were six ruling
women named Cleopatra, some of whom ruled out rites, some
alongside their husbands who came before her. So yeah, pharaoh's

(33:05):
of any gender during some chunk of the new kingdom
went into the valley of kings. Queens who didn't rule
went to the valley of queens, these temples and tombs,
which were sort of public works projects in their way,
because as best as I can tell, in these old kingdoms,
the ruler is the state. They were built by skilled workers,
and those skilled workers, like I told you, ended up

(33:27):
going on strike and ended up blockading roads and doing
sit ins and threatening sabotage and just doing all the
stuff that modern workers do. And those workers and their
strength I'm going to tell you about in part two
on Wednesday. Yep, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I have

(33:50):
a newsletter. I write a bunch of stuff on it
about preparedness, about history, about being queer, whatever, bullshit. I
don't know. It's good. Almost all this is free. You
should check it out buy home. Cool People Who Did

(34:10):
Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Goolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Host

Margaret Killjoy

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