July 15, 2026 • 36 mins
Margaret finished telling you about labor and class struggle in Ancient Egypt
Sources:
https://historyrise.com/article/slavery-and-forced-labor-and-comparative-history-across-egypt/
https://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/slaves.htm
https://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/medina.htm
https://www.ancient-egypt-online.com/ancient-egypt-kingdoms.html
https://vintage.tn/why-is-there-a-city-named-thebes-in-greece-and-a/
https://spokenpast.com/articles/egyptian-dream-book/
https://ancientegypt.fandom.com/wiki/Papyrus_Chester_Beatty_3
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/egyptian-dream-book-001621
https://www.touregypt.net/kingtomb.htm
https://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2013/01/voluntary-slavery-ancient-egyptians-paid-a-monthly-fee-to-become-temple-slaves.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-tombs-slaves-egypt
https://www.thecollector.com/hatshepsut-egyptian-queen-king/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitocris
https://historicaleve.com/how-many-cleopatras-were-there-in-egypt/
https://www.thecollector.com/interview-queen-cleopatra-with-prof-paul-cartledge-oxford/
https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-billion-crime-against-workers/
https://www.thecollector.com/how-ancient-egyptians-lived-and-worked-in-the-valley-of-kings/
https://www.google.be/books/edition/Brotherhood_of_Kings/JTvRCwAAQBAJ?hl=fr&gbpv=1&dq=chiefs+of+punt&pg=PA143&printsec=frontcover
https://www.wonderfulmuseums.com/museum/why-does-the-british-museum-not-return-artifacts/
https://www.history.com/articles/what-is-the-rosetta-stone
Oral correspondence
https://www.history.com/articles/mummy-unwrapping-parties-egyptomania
https://editions.covecollective.org/content/egypt-and-orientalism
https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2023/08/11/orientalism-through-time-and-place-a-virtual-exhibit/
https://ninercommons.charlotte.edu/record/2825?v=pdf
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1089/the-first-labor-strike-in-history/
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, I'm welcome to kobiboohed Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that workers collectively bargaining is as old
as work. We have always had each other's back, We
always will. There's never been any exceptions. There's no such
thing as a scab. Why would anyone make up such
(00:21):
a terrible word. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And
this is part two of a two parter. But the
Dierra al Medina strike the first strike in recorded history,
were the first recorded strike in history, something like that.
In part one we talked about labor in Egypt, and
(00:45):
we talked about how these big public works projects like
the tombs, weren't built by enslaved labor, but instead by
workers or about as free as people can be at
the time, which is medium. And in part two we're
gonna talk more about them. So the village of Diuerrel Medina,
(01:06):
these skilled workers, they were paid better and treated better
than most of their contemporaries. Like this was like this
is the this is the fucking you've made it job.
You know, you're still like a worker. You're working on
pharaoh tombs. You know, they came from all over. There
were at least thirty different foreign names recorded among these workers,
(01:28):
and we actually know more about them than most ancient
working class people because everyone was writing shit down, mostly
legal stuff like money and marriage and divorce and lawsuits.
Well it wasn't got lawsuits. It's called legal redress, but
in the thing that I read, but I think that
means lawsuits, because like overall, we have this problem in
history where we tend to only know what the rich
(01:50):
people and the rulers did because that's the only people
that people bothered to write anything down about. And so
that's why this is such an interesting exception and why
to me it implies that the kinds of things that
they did, like collective bargaining, are indicative of that being.
If not common, then certainly, like if it was written
down in one of the only times we have ancient
(02:11):
shit about working class people written down, I suspect it
also happened other times too, you know. Anyway, this town
was founded during the eighteenth dynasty under Amenhotep the first,
so sometime in the fifteen twenty seven to fifteen oh
six BCE range, because that's when that guy was a pharaoh.
Women here had legal rights. They were high up in
(02:32):
the temples, and they were probably doing a decent bit
of the writing. They weren't the people who are called
the workers in this particular context. The workers were skilled craftsmen,
and they made furniture and funery stuff for other people,
not just for the Pharaoh. Funery equipment meant grave goods,
jewelry and pottery and art objects of all kinds. And
(02:52):
I'm going to take you on a tangent about that.
I am currently kind of fascinated by the human instinct
to make a really fancy shit and then just like
get rid of it, just bury it, just throw it
in the river. Like I know. The religious significance is different.
But during our episodes about all the Gulls and the Celts,
we talked about how they would make hundreds of axeads
(03:14):
just to bury them in holes, or how they threw
so much gold into lakes that the Roman imperialists when
they came and invaded, they would auction off the Celtic
lakes to entrepreneurs who would dredge them up for treasure.
To the Celts, this throwing away of things that were
made that were you know, had value was sacrifice to
the Thonic gods. The gods of the earth, but we
(03:37):
still have wishing wells today. I visited World War two
submarine recently, and it serves frankly as sort of a
shrine to the past. I know. I went there to
honor my ancestor, my grandfather who fought one of those things.
And there's a spot where people throw coins down through
the grate to the inaccessible sub floor below. It's like
(03:58):
a wishing well. There's still things that we have, and
there's an argument to be made that the vast wealth
of the medieval church was basically a sacrifice of the
fine goods to remove them from private hands. Unfortunately, since
priests are still people and the wealth kind of got
to their heads in a lot of cases, a lot
of the church reform at various points was like, hey,
(04:20):
we got rich again. That was kind of our whole
point was not do that. Probably throwing shit into a
lake worked out better socially, but who knows. Disposing of
things that have value has been a religious act in
so many places I've read about. I'd always assumed grave
goods were generally the stuff rich people had during life,
but here's at least one data point where the funery
(04:42):
equipment consisted of objects made for them for the sole
purpose of burial. I've said it a thousand times already,
but I'm kind of obsessed with how to sacrifice means
to make something sacred. Even the idea of burying the
dead into tombs instead of more traditional burial styles like
sky burial aka people out for the birds or burning
(05:02):
them at a pyre seems to map to class stratification.
Burial often comes with class stratification. Once there's rich people,
they get buried, they get you know, put into the earth,
and instead of just sort of disposed of like in
the Old Kingdom, only the pharaohs needed a special afterlife burial,
But these New Kingdom folks are making funery equipment on
(05:23):
the side for anyone with the money for them, Like,
for example, the foreman of the village, a man named Ka.
He's got his own tomb and he was buried with
a ton of grave goods. Anyway, the workers would often
head over to Thebes to sell things. Thebes is the
capital of the country at that point, and compared to
like it is sometimes Memphis, which is further up north
(05:44):
than Thebes, is further south. And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking but Margaret, doesn't Thebes a city in Greece? Well,
I thought that too. There are two Thebes. And the
reason that there are two Thebes is that, Okay, the
Thebes in Greece is really old, like as old as Egypt,
like three thousand BCE. Ancient Greeks, if they wanted to
(06:06):
call something really old, they would be like, it's as
old as Thebes. The Egyptians didn't have a city named Thebes.
They had a city named wasit the big temple? They
called ta Opet. So years later when the Greeks showed up,
well after our story from today, they were like, ta Opet.
(06:27):
That sounds like Theibah, which sounds like Thebes. So there
you go, Bob's your uncle. Thebes is a city in Egypt.
Never change, Europeans, actually, please do change anyway, the workers
hung out in the capitol. That's my point here. I'm
always like vaguely annoyed that we use the exonyms for
(06:47):
these various places that we don't call it. Was it
that we call it Thebes. But on the other hand,
I know that like anyone who's like, oh, did you
go to Naples? No, I went to Napoli, like those
people are really annoying, and so maybe it would be
really annoying to be like, I don't know of a
Egyptian city named Thebes. I only know whasit. You know,
(07:10):
I don't know where I land on this. This is
like the really important questions of our time. But their
whole town, which was not called Dierre al Medina at
the time, but that's what we call it now to
avoid calling it Napoli. The whole town was dry as fuck,
which is why it's still around kind of, and the
community well was filled by people carrying water from the
(07:30):
nearby nile. For all the working people in this town,
there's like the like skilled craftsmen. There's a lot of
people who are like lesser doing quote unquote on skilled
labor there as well. It's a small town, a little
over one hundred houses, most of them inside the wall,
some of them outside the wall. And they're not just
simple huts. There are like four room brick houses. They
have cellars, they have altars. Presumably the men worked as
(07:53):
laborers and the women worked at home, mostly baking, I think,
and the men were sorted into two work gangs, the
left side the right side, which was just which side
of any given tomb they worked on, and they were
organized in a more or less military fashion. People had
specialized skilled skills carpenters and sculptors and masons and shit.
(08:13):
Plus there's all the assistants who brought water, cut the wood,
wash the clothes, all that kind of shit. It was
kind of assembly line work. They would divide up the
wall basically using a chalk line like we do today,
only it was a string dipped in ink instead of chalk,
and then each person or each group of people take
a section and just get it done, painting drafts and
various colors before starting in on the carving and then
(08:36):
painting it their final colors. The work week was ten
days long, with three weeks in a month. I've read
that the weekend was three days long, and I've read
that it was two days long. I've read that it
was the last two days of each week in the
first day of the next week, and I've also read
it's just two days, so seven or eight days on,
two or three days off, nine days off a month
(08:56):
to our eight. And the work wasn't really mandatory. Workers
took off all the time. People would call in sick,
or they'd call in stung by a scorpion, or called
in tired of working for a while, like you know,
sore right. They also called in building shit for my
family this week instead sorry, and they called in building
(09:17):
a different thing for my corrupt boss instead of what
I'm supposed to be doing. Many workers only worked on
tombs one day a week. When they were working. The
laborers slept in huts closer to the work site during
the week because it was a long walk back home
about two kilometers but like really steep and sketchy. I
was actually reading. They eventually figured out that everyone got
(09:38):
osteoarthritis from all of the walk They like compared the
men and the women of the town and realized that
all the men had osteoarthritis from walking up and down
this sketchy steep thing all of the time. And part
of why we know all of this, when we know
the osteoarthritis think is of skeletal analysis. But the thing
that we know about like everything else about like called
(09:58):
in scorpion stone, right, is that they kept scribes around
who took notes about all the work being done, and
shit wasn't getting written down for posterity. Early writing was
entirely concerned with money with value. These were time cards. Basically,
the scribes tracked who came to work and who didn't.
The scribes tracked who'd been paid how much, and who
(10:20):
took what out of the storehouses. There was literature too,
though multiple copies of specific satires were found on the
site in people's homes, so people just had like, ah,
here's the funny story has been going around. Everyone's reading it.
I got one at home. And there were adventure stories
about the gods. There was the story of Sanujah, the
(10:41):
adventures of a man who fled Egypt to Palestine. Fascinating
to me is the fact that the story of Sanuja
probably started off as a coffin text. And these coffin texts,
I promise you I'd tell you what they are. These
are the spells that were inscribed in the coffins of
the dead to help them reach the afterlife. And I
really like the idea that one of the oldest adventure
(11:01):
stories in history was a spell inscribed into a tomb.
But then the writers went above and beyond and were like,
all right, but now let's throw a plot into this
bad boy be like you all buried me and put
the text of my amazing novel Escape from in Cell
Island into It. Don't do that, but it would be funny.
(11:22):
More recently, in nineteen twenty eight CE, you know, like
one hundred years ago, some grave robbers again the kind
of degrees, found a whole library in the tomb of
one scribe, and he had a papyrus scroll now called
the Egyptian Dream Book, which talks about dream divination. Around
one hundred of the interpretations have survived the millennia. I've
also read two hundred and twenty two. But it's important
(11:45):
to understand these interpretations were not like direct one to one.
Not every person had the temperament to make these particular
interpretations accurate. There was also skill involved in interpreting dreams,
understanding what they would mean for each person. These interpretations
for what was considered a Sethian temperamented person who is
(12:06):
chaotic and drunken and fit to prones of rage. Someone
is stormy with dangerous power. So if that's you, here's
some dream interpretations for you. If a man sees himself
immersing in the river in a dream, it is good.
It means purification from badness. If a man sees himself
dead in a dream, it is good. It means a
(12:29):
long life is ahead of him. If a man sees
himself writing on a papyrus role in a dream, it
is bad. It means his crimes will be reckoned by
his God. And let's see. If you see yourself eating
a crocodile, you're going to become an official. If you're
burying an old man in your dream, you will flourish.
If you've got white sandals in your dream, though when
(12:50):
you're walking around, you are doomed to wander the earth.
If you dream about fucking a lady, that's bad because
it's an indication of mourning. If you dream about getting hard,
it means your enemies are going to be victorious. If
you dream about drinking warm beer, suffering is coming. And
if you dream that you're looking out a window, that's good.
(13:10):
It means that God will hear your cries. But do
you know who else will hear your cries and will
interpret your dreams for you. The products and services that
support this show just when it says any additional notes,
as you're filling out that form to acquire that product
or service, just write in the whole of your dream,
(13:30):
and they will know this is a lie. They're not
actually going to interpret your dream for you. I mean
they might eat and we're back. So in this tiny
little town, they had their own court system. Like a
(13:51):
lot of places, the early judges were basically people who
are either respected or high up in the hierarchy. So
the foreman, the scribe, the deputy. There's like guards and shit,
and anyone who people specifically trusted or had been around
a while. This court, the ken Bet did civil stuff
and misdemeanors. I'm just calling it misdemeanors, like lesser crimes.
(14:13):
Anything that's a capital crime, felonies, they're off to thebes
stealing stuff, especially if you denied stealing stuff before the
gods but were proven to be lying, that'll get you executed.
But since they wrote everything down, we know that most
of the cases were like so and so didn't pay
so and so for the thing they bought. They sued
each other a lot. There were guardians, there's other jobs.
(14:36):
There's guardians who guarded the tomb and also handed out
tools to workers and made sure no one was chiseling
away and either copper chisels to pocket the copper. There
were doorkeepers who closed up at night and paid the
workers their grain and served as witnesses and disputes. There
were police, and the police were there to protect the
tomb against like invasion and like you know, banditry and stuff,
and they also investigated tomb robbery and so like they
(14:58):
were there to both protect the people and police the people.
The workers were constantly under suspicion because they were constantly
stealing stuff because the urge to steal from work is
probably hardwired into our brains. They would steal fat and
oil from work candles to use in their home candles,
for example. And all these workers I keep calling this
(15:19):
wage labor. It's not like you would imagine wage labor
is designed to make sure that you don't get ahead.
Like wage labor is designed to give you enough so
that you kind of just don't die so that you
can keep working. Like that's what it's been since pretty
much the beginning. And these days they have to kind
(15:40):
of build in a like, nah, you're totally going to
get ahead. You do this for forty years and you
get to have an RV or if you do it right,
you're going to be a gazillionaire. You know. Somehow well,
they used to be more honest about it. Wage labor
the free labor, and it just paid you in rations.
They let you live there, and they paid you in rations.
(16:01):
That's what wages is. That's what it comes from. The
workers were paid in grain mostly, plus other necessities like
wood as fuel and clay for pottery and vegetables and
fish for like eating and holiday bonuses were paid out
sometimes the salt and sesame oil and meat. And there's
no currency at this point anyway. Read the book Debt
(16:23):
by David Graeber for a history of currency and to
learn neat things like how debt is an older idea
than money, and money is an older idea than burder.
For most of history, people have basically just worked for
room and board, best as I can tell. Again, that's
what wage labor is still designed to basically be. We
(16:44):
just like to abstract it and think we're free. But
as old as time, well as old as wage labor,
at least there was corruption. One scribe named Kenner Keberschev
was accused of accepting bribes two different times. Works accused
him of using the workgang to do work for him
during work hours. Then one worker wrote, quote, what does
(17:07):
his bad way mean? In which you behave to me.
If there is some beer, you do not look for me.
But if there is some work, you do look for me.
And that is a universal thought. If there is some beer,
you don't look for me, but if there is work,
you do look for me. And also where there are wages,
(17:29):
there's wage theft. Wage theft is when a boss doesn't
pay you what you are owed, and it is far
and away the most common sort of theft in the
United States of America. In twenty nineteen, just as an example,
all combined robberies amounted to four hundred and eighty two
million dollars. Wage theft was fifty billion dollars. That's one
(17:49):
hundred times higher. There's all kinds of graphs you can
see of like every single kind of how people steal
from each other, and it's just this tiny little chunk
is the stuff that we call a crime. Wage theft
is fucking everything. The rich are stealing from you right now.
They're stealing from you just by not giving you the
value of what you create, but they are extra stealing
(18:11):
from you on top of that. They tell you guys
to show up thirty minutes early to work, and they
don't pay you for it. They are fucking stealing your time.
They like to pretend like we're equals, that it's all
a free choice. Yet they talked down to us anyway.
That's been a labor agitation with Margaret. Back to the story,
and it was here in this city of workers. The
(18:32):
oldest known worker strike took place way before coins existed.
Coins didn't show up until about five hundred years later.
Before the advent of the labor strike was the advent
of wage theft. During the reign of Ramses the Third
eleven eighty four to eleven fifty three PCE, administrators were
corrupt as fucking thebes at nearby capital, the grain reserves
(18:55):
were dangerously low. Workers were barely being paid. Described Neferhotep wrote,
quote one and a half car of grain. It's like
one hundred and sixty eight pounds have been taken from us.
We are dying. We cannot live. That was twenty five
years into Ramsey's the Third's reign. They put up with
(19:16):
it for several more years after that was written. In
the twenty ninth year and the twenty first day of
the second month, another scribe filed a formal complaint to
the temple months went by no relief. So in the
sixth month of the year, after their rations were delayed
eighteen days, all the men stopped working both gangs. This
(19:37):
was November fourteenth, eleven fifty two BC. They stopped working
and they all go to the mortuary temple of one
of the pharaohs. Dead Pharaoh's got a mortuary temple and
a separate tomb at this point, and they staged a
sit in. They just like showed up and we're like,
we're not fucking going give us our food. I hope
they sang like a tree beside the water, we shall
not be moved, but it can't prove that they did.
(20:01):
And so they were like, all right, well here's some pastries.
You have a fucking pizza party. But none of their
rations and that didn't work. I mean they ate the pastries,
like when your boss throws you a pizza party and
you should still eat the pizza. It's just not instead
of paying you overtime. So the next day they went
to another temple. The third day they went to a
third temple, or maybe on the second day they went
(20:22):
to the central grain storehouse in the city. I have
somehow read both even though there's only like one source,
there's one primary source for this, and I read it
and it was really hard for me to understand, both
because of the translation and just everything happening within it.
So I was like, honestly kind of reliant on secondary
sources in order to try and make sense of it.
(20:43):
And secondary sources didn't agree with each other. But maybe
they went to the central grain storehouse in the city
and that primary source. It fits onto a single sheet
of a pirrus, and it's missing pieces here or there,
it's more or less intact. So journal that's like, the
workers went and they sat down in the temple and
they spent the night there, and the workers say they're starving.
And the workers have been paid the following amount of
what they erowed the chief of police. Once they get
(21:06):
to wherever they go, this will shock you. The chief
of police was not on their side. He was like,
go home, get back to work, don't worry, we'll handle it.
And they did get that month's rations, so they went home,
but then they found out they wouldn't get the next
month's rations, so they went back on strike. They blocked
the road into the Valley of the Kings, so people
(21:27):
couldn't go offer food and drink to the dead. And
the guards were like, we'll move you by a force,
and the strikers were like, if you do, we'll fuck
up the tombs. So now we get sit ins, road blockades,
collective bargaining the thread of sabotage. It's fucking cool. I'm
really excited about this story. There was this whole social
(21:50):
peace thing. It was an important Egyptian value at the
time Mott the pharaoh was supposed to respect it and
the workers were supposed to respect it. Don't rock the boat.
But after years of striking, this whole thing lested I
think around three years, to quote a write up by
Worldstory dot Work quote, at last, some sort of resolution
(22:11):
seems to have been reached, whereby officials were able to
make payments to the workers on time. But the dynamic
of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed,
as had the practical application of maat. These would never
really revert to their former understandings. Again, Mahaut was the
responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers,
(22:34):
and yet the men of Dieirel Medina had taken upon
themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in
the policies which helped maintain the essential harmony and balance.
The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities
of the king. And so yeah, for three years or so,
whenever their rations would be late, they'd strike, and then
the rations would come and they go back to work,
(22:56):
and then repeat, and then finally they won. But they
did it at least twice more, at least once more
under the same reign, and then later under another Ramseys
Ramsey's The Eleventh and in case you needed another reason
to hate AI, one of the only articles I could
find about this event online. It was clearly written by AI.
(23:17):
And when I say clearly, I mean I'd read this
shit all day every day, so I was able to
sell by AI, but it disguised itself as not AI.
In that article, the AI one claims that they were
led by a man named Paneb. But Paneb was actually
a corrupt work leader with accusations of sexual assault against him,
and I found no source that backs up that he
was involved in the strike. In the primary source in
(23:39):
the document, one person after the strike was resolved says
Panab was my father, and that's it. If there was
a leader. It might have been aman Nacht who did
the negotiations with the officials during the strike. But AI
just figured, oh, there's a work leader named Paneb, so
the strike must have had a leader. So it was Paneb.
And so it just writes in this strike was led
(24:00):
by Pineb and now it is poisoning one of the
main articles online about the very first labor action in
history by claiming its leader was a piece of shit
sexual assault. AI doesn't do research, and you shouldn't use it,
and people who use it to write history articles should
probably and if that's not enough to stop them, then
(24:22):
but you know who, we shouldn't do that too. We
shouldn't do that to our sponsors. We love our sponsors.
In Rebec, most of the writing around ancient Egypt describes
the people as super pious, worshiping the gods, worshiping the
(24:44):
Pharaoh as the personification of the gods, and all of that.
But the tombs were heavily guarded because heavily armed groups
of people kept robbing them. The British were really late
to the scene. Unfortunately for them. They wanted to rob
the tombs and managed to robbed quite a few of them,
but the overwhelming majority of these tombs were robbed millennia ago,
(25:06):
not that long after people put tons of really expensive
shit into tombs. People were like, yeah, but what if
that was my stuff? Instead, the tombs were largely robbed
by the workers themselves, as best as I can tell,
or at least they helped out the robbers basically when
they stopped being paid. Central control started to waver during
the twentieth dynasty, the kind of the end of the
(25:28):
New Kingdom, and Egypt was a country beset by many enemies.
Workers in the Valley of Kings weren't getting paid as
regularly and so they weren't guarding the tombs as well,
and organized groups started robbing the places with inside help,
which means that stealing from work is also as old
as wage labor. If you ain't getting paid what your rowed,
(25:51):
take what you rowede to tail as old as time.
But I think that this organized robbery of the Valley
of Kings was a little bit less of like what
I wanted to be, being like, fuck you, you didn't
pay me, I'm taking this shit. I'm walking around with
gold now, and more that the corruption in the local
governments was looking around for sources of income, and was like,
oh about these tombs, So a little bit more like
(26:13):
mafia and a little less not robin hood, but like
happy banditry. I don't know whenever, and yeah, the New
Kingdom eventually ceased being around in an effective way, and
roughly around one thousand BCE workers kind of just left
the place because people started getting buried elsewhere. Folks would
just come back from time to time to visit the
(26:35):
various temples. And I just wanted to make a final
note here about grave robbing and Egyptology and all of that.
I've been calling the European archaeologists egyptologists. They call themselves
grave robbers throughout these episodes, not because I think there's
no value to archaeology, and not even out of like
theological respect for dead monarchs, but because of the history
(26:58):
of colonialism and the infamous entitlement to other people's history
that the British historically had. There's a museum that I've
been to called the British Museum, and it's in you know, Britain.
It's in the name, and it is packed to the
brim with stolen shit that for some odd reason, most
of the world refuses to call stolen shit. If you
search British Museum full of stolen shit on doc doc Go,
(27:21):
like I did, thinking it might possibly help me, I
find a lot of handwringing about some recent thefts from
UK museums. In the past few years, thousands of artifacts
have gone missing from the British Museum, seemingly an inside job.
Now I can get why people are upset by this,
but like these objects don't belong to the British. The
British Museum defends it's holding on to all this stolen
(27:43):
shit by saying, quote, the trustees believe that the collections
are held in trust for the benefit of the world
and future generations, that they are best preserved and made
accessible in London, and they contribute to a universal understanding
of human history. Imagine if someone store your granddad's favorite
(28:04):
watch and decided not to give it back for a
reason like that. Imagine if someone stole your granddad's body
and decided to not give it back for a reason
like that. We've talked before on this show about Orientalism
a fair amount. It's a sort of specific mystical othering
of Asia, especially Southwest Asia, and it's common in the West,
(28:27):
the idea that these ancient people have mystical ways of
life that are utterly alien to our own. Putting people
on pedestals often goes hand in hand with oppressing them.
Ironically enough, some Europeans were fascinated by the Near East,
but overall, the otherness is used to justify atrocities like colonialism.
(28:50):
You see a similar thing in the construction of coolness
that white America does to Black America. Black people simultaneously
put on a pedestal as the arbiters of cool and
the originators of culture, while also basically colonized for their
cultural production and generally mistreated systematically. We've talked about both
of those things recently. And the word Egyptology isn't used
(29:13):
as like a bad word, like orientalism, like people don't
call themselves Orientalists, but people call themselves Egyptologists. It's the
serious study of ancient Egypt. And I can't tell you
that the word itself is inherently problematic. It rubs me
the wrong way. But I am not studied in exactly
the social context behind the current use of the word egyptology.
(29:36):
But best as I can sort out the reason that
Egyptology is presented as its own unique thing is because
of the Victorian obsession with Egypt that reeks of orientalism
and anti blackness all at once. It probably started when Napoleon,
the more famous one Bonaparte invaded Egypt in seventeen ninety
eight and said kind of stunning things, like not in
(29:58):
a bad way, like genuinely kind of beautiful things like
from the heights of these pyramids forty centuries looked down
on us. And Napoleon brought scientists with him on his conquest,
and he set up the Institute of Egypt, bringing even
more scientists honestly that might deserve scare quotes to the area.
Egyptomania spread across Europe. Grave robbers with degrees poured into
(30:21):
the country and found pretty important shit like the Rosetta Stone,
a text inscribed in three languages that basically unlocked hieroglyphics
for everyone, including modern Egyptians who hadn't used the writing
style in a thousand years. It was genuinely cool that
suddenly everyone could read this ancient shit and learn so much.
There are still untranslated scripts from the ancient world that
(30:44):
one day, I hope we find the Rosetta Stone for
but why is that stone in London and not in
Egypt to this day? And the thing is, most Egyptomania
was not serious scientific inquiry. Most Orientalism isn't a sincere
appreciation for the cultural production of the Near East. Most
exotification isn't actually a form of respect. Victorians became obsessed
(31:10):
with mummies, and mummies were being stolen from Egypt at
a fantastic rate, like literally just robbing the country of
it's dead. Rich people would own mummies and keep them
in their houses and have big parties, mummy unwrapping parties.
It's a whole thing where they would unwrap the mummies
to do a seance and shit, it was like a
(31:30):
mystery box from three thousand years ago. There might be
jewels inside, but mostly you're doing it to flex how
fucking decadent and rich and cultured you are. And there
was a medical substance medical gets scare quotes here called
mumeia that's been around for hundreds of years. It's ground
up mummy powder. It's good for what ails you. If
(31:52):
you go to a mummy party, you'll maybe get a
little ground up mummy in a gift basket to take
home and you can make tea with it, or according
to a friend I trust, but I don't have the
written source he used, you can smoke it to get
high and connect with the spooky ancient dead. There was
a paint color called mummy brown that had ground up
(32:12):
mummy in it. So this is the literal deep personification
of Egyptians, right Like if someone was like, hey, I
got a bit of dead person. This like dead human flesh,
would you like some dead human flesh? You should eat
human flesh and that will be good for you people.
(32:35):
Unless you're at a Catholic church, people will be like,
that's fucking weird, why would I do that? But when
it's a mummy, it's just a spooky thing. It's a
fucking brown person. Anyway, you probably get the point. It
was Napoleon science guys, that's the technical term, who discovered
the Valley of Kings, so we owe our knowledge of
(32:57):
the first labor strike to them. It was Agypdomania that
inspired one of my favorite poems of all time, Osi
Mendeas by Percy Shelley. Egypt's specific orientalism inspired both wildly
disrespectful assholes and people genuinely interested in learning more about
the world and about humanity and improving it. But that
doesn't mean that even those people's hands are clean. The
(33:21):
Palestinian American guy who coined the word orientalism, Edward Sayid,
put it pretty clearly. Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient and the British Museum
was crucial for this. The British could go see the
glory of their empire just by going on down to
(33:42):
the museum. Look at all that knowledge we've gathered. Truly,
we're making the world a better place. I would love
to believe that science knows no borders, and one day
I think we can live in that world. We just
have to destroy borders first, and imperialism and capitalism and
white supremacy. The British mind basically couldn't fathom that modern
(34:07):
Egypt existed in the lineage of ancient Egypt. And that
sounds wild, right, But like modern Egypt in their minds,
a bad, smelly place full of ungrateful wretches, But ancient
Egypt was a magical land full of strange wisdom and
occult learnings. To quote the scholar Samantha rivenbark the Victorians
divided Egypt into quote, a glorious history and an uninteresting
(34:31):
present and said that quote British archaeologists excavating Egypt for
its ancient artifacts largely regarded contemporary Egyptians as a nuisance
or a source of unskilled labor. So yeah, it was
shit like unearthing the wonders of the world, despite the
ignorant brown masses that fueled British nationalism and empire. And
(34:54):
that's not science with its inherent if if you look
at it through uist into glasses internationalism. Instead, it's just
nationalism and chauvinism and orientalism and a lot of badisms
and not the good isms. So they were looters, they
were grave robbers, and their stolen shit is still on
(35:14):
display as trophies of their fucking victory in the British Museum.
I'm honestly grateful that the ancient Egyptians managed to rob
their own king's graves so thoroughly first thousands of years ago,
because they weren't getting paid enough to live. If I
have a thesis to this episode, it's this grave robbery
(35:35):
is cool when you steal from your own dead kings
and bad when you steal artifacts from places you're colonizing anyway,
unrelated any of that. I'm sad to say that the
gold ornamentation that Trump seems to be filling the White
House with is probably just spray painted bullshit. That's the
problem with modern plutocrats, fewer liquid assets to steal. That's
(35:58):
the end of the episodes. I hope you enjoyed hearing
about the first labor strike, and if you want to
hear more of well read more of what I have
to say. I have a newsletter. It's Margaret Kiljoy dot
substack dot com. Almost everything on there is free. There's
like more personal stuff that's for paid subscribers, only not
like in a wing quank way, but like just actually
(36:19):
just more personal writing tends to be behind a pay well,
but almost everything I say isn't. And take care of
each other. Fuck ice free Palestine. See y'all next week.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. The more podcasts and Cool Zone Media,
(36:42):
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on her radio app, ap A podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hello, I'm welcome to kobiboohed Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that workers collectively bargaining is as old
as work. We have always had each other's back, We
always will. There's never been any exceptions. There's no such
thing as a scab. Why would anyone make up such
(00:21):
a terrible word. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy. And
this is part two of a two parter. But the
Dierra al Medina strike the first strike in recorded history,
were the first recorded strike in history, something like that.
In part one we talked about labor in Egypt, and
(00:45):
we talked about how these big public works projects like
the tombs, weren't built by enslaved labor, but instead by
workers or about as free as people can be at
the time, which is medium. And in part two we're
gonna talk more about them. So the village of Diuerrel Medina,
(01:06):
these skilled workers, they were paid better and treated better
than most of their contemporaries. Like this was like this
is the this is the fucking you've made it job.
You know, you're still like a worker. You're working on
pharaoh tombs. You know, they came from all over. There
were at least thirty different foreign names recorded among these workers,
(01:28):
and we actually know more about them than most ancient
working class people because everyone was writing shit down, mostly
legal stuff like money and marriage and divorce and lawsuits.
Well it wasn't got lawsuits. It's called legal redress, but
in the thing that I read, but I think that
means lawsuits, because like overall, we have this problem in
history where we tend to only know what the rich
(01:50):
people and the rulers did because that's the only people
that people bothered to write anything down about. And so
that's why this is such an interesting exception and why
to me it implies that the kinds of things that
they did, like collective bargaining, are indicative of that being.
If not common, then certainly, like if it was written
down in one of the only times we have ancient
(02:11):
shit about working class people written down, I suspect it
also happened other times too, you know. Anyway, this town
was founded during the eighteenth dynasty under Amenhotep the first,
so sometime in the fifteen twenty seven to fifteen oh
six BCE range, because that's when that guy was a pharaoh.
Women here had legal rights. They were high up in
(02:32):
the temples, and they were probably doing a decent bit
of the writing. They weren't the people who are called
the workers in this particular context. The workers were skilled craftsmen,
and they made furniture and funery stuff for other people,
not just for the Pharaoh. Funery equipment meant grave goods,
jewelry and pottery and art objects of all kinds. And
(02:52):
I'm going to take you on a tangent about that.
I am currently kind of fascinated by the human instinct
to make a really fancy shit and then just like
get rid of it, just bury it, just throw it
in the river. Like I know. The religious significance is different.
But during our episodes about all the Gulls and the Celts,
we talked about how they would make hundreds of axeads
(03:14):
just to bury them in holes, or how they threw
so much gold into lakes that the Roman imperialists when
they came and invaded, they would auction off the Celtic
lakes to entrepreneurs who would dredge them up for treasure.
To the Celts, this throwing away of things that were
made that were you know, had value was sacrifice to
the Thonic gods. The gods of the earth, but we
(03:37):
still have wishing wells today. I visited World War two
submarine recently, and it serves frankly as sort of a
shrine to the past. I know. I went there to
honor my ancestor, my grandfather who fought one of those things.
And there's a spot where people throw coins down through
the grate to the inaccessible sub floor below. It's like
(03:58):
a wishing well. There's still things that we have, and
there's an argument to be made that the vast wealth
of the medieval church was basically a sacrifice of the
fine goods to remove them from private hands. Unfortunately, since
priests are still people and the wealth kind of got
to their heads in a lot of cases, a lot
of the church reform at various points was like, hey,
(04:20):
we got rich again. That was kind of our whole
point was not do that. Probably throwing shit into a
lake worked out better socially, but who knows. Disposing of
things that have value has been a religious act in
so many places I've read about. I'd always assumed grave
goods were generally the stuff rich people had during life,
but here's at least one data point where the funery
(04:42):
equipment consisted of objects made for them for the sole
purpose of burial. I've said it a thousand times already,
but I'm kind of obsessed with how to sacrifice means
to make something sacred. Even the idea of burying the
dead into tombs instead of more traditional burial styles like
sky burial aka people out for the birds or burning
(05:02):
them at a pyre seems to map to class stratification.
Burial often comes with class stratification. Once there's rich people,
they get buried, they get you know, put into the earth,
and instead of just sort of disposed of like in
the Old Kingdom, only the pharaohs needed a special afterlife burial,
But these New Kingdom folks are making funery equipment on
(05:23):
the side for anyone with the money for them, Like,
for example, the foreman of the village, a man named Ka.
He's got his own tomb and he was buried with
a ton of grave goods. Anyway, the workers would often
head over to Thebes to sell things. Thebes is the
capital of the country at that point, and compared to
like it is sometimes Memphis, which is further up north
(05:44):
than Thebes, is further south. And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking but Margaret, doesn't Thebes a city in Greece? Well,
I thought that too. There are two Thebes. And the
reason that there are two Thebes is that, Okay, the
Thebes in Greece is really old, like as old as Egypt,
like three thousand BCE. Ancient Greeks, if they wanted to
(06:06):
call something really old, they would be like, it's as
old as Thebes. The Egyptians didn't have a city named Thebes.
They had a city named wasit the big temple? They
called ta Opet. So years later when the Greeks showed up,
well after our story from today, they were like, ta Opet.
(06:27):
That sounds like Theibah, which sounds like Thebes. So there
you go, Bob's your uncle. Thebes is a city in Egypt.
Never change, Europeans, actually, please do change anyway, the workers
hung out in the capitol. That's my point here. I'm
always like vaguely annoyed that we use the exonyms for
(06:47):
these various places that we don't call it. Was it
that we call it Thebes. But on the other hand,
I know that like anyone who's like, oh, did you
go to Naples? No, I went to Napoli, like those
people are really annoying, and so maybe it would be
really annoying to be like, I don't know of a
Egyptian city named Thebes. I only know whasit. You know,
(07:10):
I don't know where I land on this. This is
like the really important questions of our time. But their
whole town, which was not called Dierre al Medina at
the time, but that's what we call it now to
avoid calling it Napoli. The whole town was dry as fuck,
which is why it's still around kind of, and the
community well was filled by people carrying water from the
(07:30):
nearby nile. For all the working people in this town,
there's like the like skilled craftsmen. There's a lot of
people who are like lesser doing quote unquote on skilled
labor there as well. It's a small town, a little
over one hundred houses, most of them inside the wall,
some of them outside the wall. And they're not just
simple huts. There are like four room brick houses. They
have cellars, they have altars. Presumably the men worked as
(07:53):
laborers and the women worked at home, mostly baking, I think,
and the men were sorted into two work gangs, the
left side the right side, which was just which side
of any given tomb they worked on, and they were
organized in a more or less military fashion. People had
specialized skilled skills carpenters and sculptors and masons and shit.
(08:13):
Plus there's all the assistants who brought water, cut the wood,
wash the clothes, all that kind of shit. It was
kind of assembly line work. They would divide up the
wall basically using a chalk line like we do today,
only it was a string dipped in ink instead of chalk,
and then each person or each group of people take
a section and just get it done, painting drafts and
various colors before starting in on the carving and then
(08:36):
painting it their final colors. The work week was ten
days long, with three weeks in a month. I've read
that the weekend was three days long, and I've read
that it was two days long. I've read that it
was the last two days of each week in the
first day of the next week, and I've also read
it's just two days, so seven or eight days on,
two or three days off, nine days off a month
(08:56):
to our eight. And the work wasn't really mandatory. Workers
took off all the time. People would call in sick,
or they'd call in stung by a scorpion, or called
in tired of working for a while, like you know,
sore right. They also called in building shit for my
family this week instead sorry, and they called in building
(09:17):
a different thing for my corrupt boss instead of what
I'm supposed to be doing. Many workers only worked on
tombs one day a week. When they were working. The
laborers slept in huts closer to the work site during
the week because it was a long walk back home
about two kilometers but like really steep and sketchy. I
was actually reading. They eventually figured out that everyone got
(09:38):
osteoarthritis from all of the walk They like compared the
men and the women of the town and realized that
all the men had osteoarthritis from walking up and down
this sketchy steep thing all of the time. And part
of why we know all of this, when we know
the osteoarthritis think is of skeletal analysis. But the thing
that we know about like everything else about like called
(09:58):
in scorpion stone, right, is that they kept scribes around
who took notes about all the work being done, and
shit wasn't getting written down for posterity. Early writing was
entirely concerned with money with value. These were time cards. Basically,
the scribes tracked who came to work and who didn't.
The scribes tracked who'd been paid how much, and who
(10:20):
took what out of the storehouses. There was literature too,
though multiple copies of specific satires were found on the
site in people's homes, so people just had like, ah,
here's the funny story has been going around. Everyone's reading it.
I got one at home. And there were adventure stories
about the gods. There was the story of Sanujah, the
(10:41):
adventures of a man who fled Egypt to Palestine. Fascinating
to me is the fact that the story of Sanuja
probably started off as a coffin text. And these coffin texts,
I promise you I'd tell you what they are. These
are the spells that were inscribed in the coffins of
the dead to help them reach the afterlife. And I
really like the idea that one of the oldest adventure
(11:01):
stories in history was a spell inscribed into a tomb.
But then the writers went above and beyond and were like,
all right, but now let's throw a plot into this
bad boy be like you all buried me and put
the text of my amazing novel Escape from in Cell
Island into It. Don't do that, but it would be funny.
(11:22):
More recently, in nineteen twenty eight CE, you know, like
one hundred years ago, some grave robbers again the kind
of degrees, found a whole library in the tomb of
one scribe, and he had a papyrus scroll now called
the Egyptian Dream Book, which talks about dream divination. Around
one hundred of the interpretations have survived the millennia. I've
also read two hundred and twenty two. But it's important
(11:45):
to understand these interpretations were not like direct one to one.
Not every person had the temperament to make these particular
interpretations accurate. There was also skill involved in interpreting dreams,
understanding what they would mean for each person. These interpretations
for what was considered a Sethian temperamented person who is
(12:06):
chaotic and drunken and fit to prones of rage. Someone
is stormy with dangerous power. So if that's you, here's
some dream interpretations for you. If a man sees himself
immersing in the river in a dream, it is good.
It means purification from badness. If a man sees himself
dead in a dream, it is good. It means a
(12:29):
long life is ahead of him. If a man sees
himself writing on a papyrus role in a dream, it
is bad. It means his crimes will be reckoned by
his God. And let's see. If you see yourself eating
a crocodile, you're going to become an official. If you're
burying an old man in your dream, you will flourish.
If you've got white sandals in your dream, though when
(12:50):
you're walking around, you are doomed to wander the earth.
If you dream about fucking a lady, that's bad because
it's an indication of mourning. If you dream about getting hard,
it means your enemies are going to be victorious. If
you dream about drinking warm beer, suffering is coming. And
if you dream that you're looking out a window, that's good.
(13:10):
It means that God will hear your cries. But do
you know who else will hear your cries and will
interpret your dreams for you. The products and services that
support this show just when it says any additional notes,
as you're filling out that form to acquire that product
or service, just write in the whole of your dream,
(13:30):
and they will know this is a lie. They're not
actually going to interpret your dream for you. I mean
they might eat and we're back. So in this tiny
little town, they had their own court system. Like a
(13:51):
lot of places, the early judges were basically people who
are either respected or high up in the hierarchy. So
the foreman, the scribe, the deputy. There's like guards and shit,
and anyone who people specifically trusted or had been around
a while. This court, the ken Bet did civil stuff
and misdemeanors. I'm just calling it misdemeanors, like lesser crimes.
(14:13):
Anything that's a capital crime, felonies, they're off to thebes
stealing stuff, especially if you denied stealing stuff before the
gods but were proven to be lying, that'll get you executed.
But since they wrote everything down, we know that most
of the cases were like so and so didn't pay
so and so for the thing they bought. They sued
each other a lot. There were guardians, there's other jobs.
(14:36):
There's guardians who guarded the tomb and also handed out
tools to workers and made sure no one was chiseling
away and either copper chisels to pocket the copper. There
were doorkeepers who closed up at night and paid the
workers their grain and served as witnesses and disputes. There
were police, and the police were there to protect the
tomb against like invasion and like you know, banditry and stuff,
and they also investigated tomb robbery and so like they
(14:58):
were there to both protect the people and police the people.
The workers were constantly under suspicion because they were constantly
stealing stuff because the urge to steal from work is
probably hardwired into our brains. They would steal fat and
oil from work candles to use in their home candles,
for example. And all these workers I keep calling this
(15:19):
wage labor. It's not like you would imagine wage labor
is designed to make sure that you don't get ahead.
Like wage labor is designed to give you enough so
that you kind of just don't die so that you
can keep working. Like that's what it's been since pretty
much the beginning. And these days they have to kind
(15:40):
of build in a like, nah, you're totally going to
get ahead. You do this for forty years and you
get to have an RV or if you do it right,
you're going to be a gazillionaire. You know. Somehow well,
they used to be more honest about it. Wage labor
the free labor, and it just paid you in rations.
They let you live there, and they paid you in rations.
(16:01):
That's what wages is. That's what it comes from. The
workers were paid in grain mostly, plus other necessities like
wood as fuel and clay for pottery and vegetables and
fish for like eating and holiday bonuses were paid out
sometimes the salt and sesame oil and meat. And there's
no currency at this point anyway. Read the book Debt
(16:23):
by David Graeber for a history of currency and to
learn neat things like how debt is an older idea
than money, and money is an older idea than burder.
For most of history, people have basically just worked for
room and board, best as I can tell. Again, that's
what wage labor is still designed to basically be. We
(16:44):
just like to abstract it and think we're free. But
as old as time, well as old as wage labor,
at least there was corruption. One scribe named Kenner Keberschev
was accused of accepting bribes two different times. Works accused
him of using the workgang to do work for him
during work hours. Then one worker wrote, quote, what does
(17:07):
his bad way mean? In which you behave to me.
If there is some beer, you do not look for me.
But if there is some work, you do look for me.
And that is a universal thought. If there is some beer,
you don't look for me, but if there is work,
you do look for me. And also where there are wages,
(17:29):
there's wage theft. Wage theft is when a boss doesn't
pay you what you are owed, and it is far
and away the most common sort of theft in the
United States of America. In twenty nineteen, just as an example,
all combined robberies amounted to four hundred and eighty two
million dollars. Wage theft was fifty billion dollars. That's one
(17:49):
hundred times higher. There's all kinds of graphs you can
see of like every single kind of how people steal
from each other, and it's just this tiny little chunk
is the stuff that we call a crime. Wage theft
is fucking everything. The rich are stealing from you right now.
They're stealing from you just by not giving you the
value of what you create, but they are extra stealing
(18:11):
from you on top of that. They tell you guys
to show up thirty minutes early to work, and they
don't pay you for it. They are fucking stealing your time.
They like to pretend like we're equals, that it's all
a free choice. Yet they talked down to us anyway.
That's been a labor agitation with Margaret. Back to the story,
and it was here in this city of workers. The
(18:32):
oldest known worker strike took place way before coins existed.
Coins didn't show up until about five hundred years later.
Before the advent of the labor strike was the advent
of wage theft. During the reign of Ramses the Third
eleven eighty four to eleven fifty three PCE, administrators were
corrupt as fucking thebes at nearby capital, the grain reserves
(18:55):
were dangerously low. Workers were barely being paid. Described Neferhotep wrote,
quote one and a half car of grain. It's like
one hundred and sixty eight pounds have been taken from us.
We are dying. We cannot live. That was twenty five
years into Ramsey's the Third's reign. They put up with
(19:16):
it for several more years after that was written. In
the twenty ninth year and the twenty first day of
the second month, another scribe filed a formal complaint to
the temple months went by no relief. So in the
sixth month of the year, after their rations were delayed
eighteen days, all the men stopped working both gangs. This
(19:37):
was November fourteenth, eleven fifty two BC. They stopped working
and they all go to the mortuary temple of one
of the pharaohs. Dead Pharaoh's got a mortuary temple and
a separate tomb at this point, and they staged a
sit in. They just like showed up and we're like,
we're not fucking going give us our food. I hope
they sang like a tree beside the water, we shall
not be moved, but it can't prove that they did.
(20:01):
And so they were like, all right, well here's some pastries.
You have a fucking pizza party. But none of their
rations and that didn't work. I mean they ate the pastries,
like when your boss throws you a pizza party and
you should still eat the pizza. It's just not instead
of paying you overtime. So the next day they went
to another temple. The third day they went to a
third temple, or maybe on the second day they went
(20:22):
to the central grain storehouse in the city. I have
somehow read both even though there's only like one source,
there's one primary source for this, and I read it
and it was really hard for me to understand, both
because of the translation and just everything happening within it.
So I was like, honestly kind of reliant on secondary
sources in order to try and make sense of it.
(20:43):
And secondary sources didn't agree with each other. But maybe
they went to the central grain storehouse in the city
and that primary source. It fits onto a single sheet
of a pirrus, and it's missing pieces here or there,
it's more or less intact. So journal that's like, the
workers went and they sat down in the temple and
they spent the night there, and the workers say they're starving.
And the workers have been paid the following amount of
what they erowed the chief of police. Once they get
(21:06):
to wherever they go, this will shock you. The chief
of police was not on their side. He was like,
go home, get back to work, don't worry, we'll handle it.
And they did get that month's rations, so they went home,
but then they found out they wouldn't get the next
month's rations, so they went back on strike. They blocked
the road into the Valley of the Kings, so people
(21:27):
couldn't go offer food and drink to the dead. And
the guards were like, we'll move you by a force,
and the strikers were like, if you do, we'll fuck
up the tombs. So now we get sit ins, road blockades,
collective bargaining the thread of sabotage. It's fucking cool. I'm
really excited about this story. There was this whole social
(21:50):
peace thing. It was an important Egyptian value at the
time Mott the pharaoh was supposed to respect it and
the workers were supposed to respect it. Don't rock the boat.
But after years of striking, this whole thing lested I
think around three years, to quote a write up by
Worldstory dot Work quote, at last, some sort of resolution
(22:11):
seems to have been reached, whereby officials were able to
make payments to the workers on time. But the dynamic
of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed,
as had the practical application of maat. These would never
really revert to their former understandings. Again, Mahaut was the
responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers,
(22:34):
and yet the men of Dieirel Medina had taken upon
themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in
the policies which helped maintain the essential harmony and balance.
The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities
of the king. And so yeah, for three years or so,
whenever their rations would be late, they'd strike, and then
the rations would come and they go back to work,
(22:56):
and then repeat, and then finally they won. But they
did it at least twice more, at least once more
under the same reign, and then later under another Ramseys
Ramsey's The Eleventh and in case you needed another reason
to hate AI, one of the only articles I could
find about this event online. It was clearly written by AI.
(23:17):
And when I say clearly, I mean I'd read this
shit all day every day, so I was able to
sell by AI, but it disguised itself as not AI.
In that article, the AI one claims that they were
led by a man named Paneb. But Paneb was actually
a corrupt work leader with accusations of sexual assault against him,
and I found no source that backs up that he
was involved in the strike. In the primary source in
(23:39):
the document, one person after the strike was resolved says
Panab was my father, and that's it. If there was
a leader. It might have been aman Nacht who did
the negotiations with the officials during the strike. But AI
just figured, oh, there's a work leader named Paneb, so
the strike must have had a leader. So it was Paneb.
And so it just writes in this strike was led
(24:00):
by Pineb and now it is poisoning one of the
main articles online about the very first labor action in
history by claiming its leader was a piece of shit
sexual assault. AI doesn't do research, and you shouldn't use it,
and people who use it to write history articles should
probably and if that's not enough to stop them, then
(24:22):
but you know who, we shouldn't do that too. We
shouldn't do that to our sponsors. We love our sponsors.
In Rebec, most of the writing around ancient Egypt describes
the people as super pious, worshiping the gods, worshiping the
(24:44):
Pharaoh as the personification of the gods, and all of that.
But the tombs were heavily guarded because heavily armed groups
of people kept robbing them. The British were really late
to the scene. Unfortunately for them. They wanted to rob
the tombs and managed to robbed quite a few of them,
but the overwhelming majority of these tombs were robbed millennia ago,
(25:06):
not that long after people put tons of really expensive
shit into tombs. People were like, yeah, but what if
that was my stuff? Instead, the tombs were largely robbed
by the workers themselves, as best as I can tell,
or at least they helped out the robbers basically when
they stopped being paid. Central control started to waver during
the twentieth dynasty, the kind of the end of the
(25:28):
New Kingdom, and Egypt was a country beset by many enemies.
Workers in the Valley of Kings weren't getting paid as
regularly and so they weren't guarding the tombs as well,
and organized groups started robbing the places with inside help,
which means that stealing from work is also as old
as wage labor. If you ain't getting paid what your rowed,
(25:51):
take what you rowede to tail as old as time.
But I think that this organized robbery of the Valley
of Kings was a little bit less of like what
I wanted to be, being like, fuck you, you didn't
pay me, I'm taking this shit. I'm walking around with
gold now, and more that the corruption in the local
governments was looking around for sources of income, and was like,
oh about these tombs, So a little bit more like
(26:13):
mafia and a little less not robin hood, but like
happy banditry. I don't know whenever, and yeah, the New
Kingdom eventually ceased being around in an effective way, and
roughly around one thousand BCE workers kind of just left
the place because people started getting buried elsewhere. Folks would
just come back from time to time to visit the
(26:35):
various temples. And I just wanted to make a final
note here about grave robbing and Egyptology and all of that.
I've been calling the European archaeologists egyptologists. They call themselves
grave robbers throughout these episodes, not because I think there's
no value to archaeology, and not even out of like
theological respect for dead monarchs, but because of the history
(26:58):
of colonialism and the infamous entitlement to other people's history
that the British historically had. There's a museum that I've
been to called the British Museum, and it's in you know, Britain.
It's in the name, and it is packed to the
brim with stolen shit that for some odd reason, most
of the world refuses to call stolen shit. If you
search British Museum full of stolen shit on doc doc Go,
(27:21):
like I did, thinking it might possibly help me, I
find a lot of handwringing about some recent thefts from
UK museums. In the past few years, thousands of artifacts
have gone missing from the British Museum, seemingly an inside job.
Now I can get why people are upset by this,
but like these objects don't belong to the British. The
British Museum defends it's holding on to all this stolen
(27:43):
shit by saying, quote, the trustees believe that the collections
are held in trust for the benefit of the world
and future generations, that they are best preserved and made
accessible in London, and they contribute to a universal understanding
of human history. Imagine if someone store your granddad's favorite
(28:04):
watch and decided not to give it back for a
reason like that. Imagine if someone stole your granddad's body
and decided to not give it back for a reason
like that. We've talked before on this show about Orientalism
a fair amount. It's a sort of specific mystical othering
of Asia, especially Southwest Asia, and it's common in the West,
(28:27):
the idea that these ancient people have mystical ways of
life that are utterly alien to our own. Putting people
on pedestals often goes hand in hand with oppressing them.
Ironically enough, some Europeans were fascinated by the Near East,
but overall, the otherness is used to justify atrocities like colonialism.
(28:50):
You see a similar thing in the construction of coolness
that white America does to Black America. Black people simultaneously
put on a pedestal as the arbiters of cool and
the originators of culture, while also basically colonized for their
cultural production and generally mistreated systematically. We've talked about both
of those things recently. And the word Egyptology isn't used
(29:13):
as like a bad word, like orientalism, like people don't
call themselves Orientalists, but people call themselves Egyptologists. It's the
serious study of ancient Egypt. And I can't tell you
that the word itself is inherently problematic. It rubs me
the wrong way. But I am not studied in exactly
the social context behind the current use of the word egyptology.
(29:36):
But best as I can sort out the reason that
Egyptology is presented as its own unique thing is because
of the Victorian obsession with Egypt that reeks of orientalism
and anti blackness all at once. It probably started when Napoleon,
the more famous one Bonaparte invaded Egypt in seventeen ninety
eight and said kind of stunning things, like not in
(29:58):
a bad way, like genuinely kind of beautiful things like
from the heights of these pyramids forty centuries looked down
on us. And Napoleon brought scientists with him on his conquest,
and he set up the Institute of Egypt, bringing even
more scientists honestly that might deserve scare quotes to the area.
Egyptomania spread across Europe. Grave robbers with degrees poured into
(30:21):
the country and found pretty important shit like the Rosetta Stone,
a text inscribed in three languages that basically unlocked hieroglyphics
for everyone, including modern Egyptians who hadn't used the writing
style in a thousand years. It was genuinely cool that
suddenly everyone could read this ancient shit and learn so much.
There are still untranslated scripts from the ancient world that
(30:44):
one day, I hope we find the Rosetta Stone for
but why is that stone in London and not in
Egypt to this day? And the thing is, most Egyptomania
was not serious scientific inquiry. Most Orientalism isn't a sincere
appreciation for the cultural production of the Near East. Most
exotification isn't actually a form of respect. Victorians became obsessed
(31:10):
with mummies, and mummies were being stolen from Egypt at
a fantastic rate, like literally just robbing the country of
it's dead. Rich people would own mummies and keep them
in their houses and have big parties, mummy unwrapping parties.
It's a whole thing where they would unwrap the mummies
to do a seance and shit, it was like a
(31:30):
mystery box from three thousand years ago. There might be
jewels inside, but mostly you're doing it to flex how
fucking decadent and rich and cultured you are. And there
was a medical substance medical gets scare quotes here called
mumeia that's been around for hundreds of years. It's ground
up mummy powder. It's good for what ails you. If
(31:52):
you go to a mummy party, you'll maybe get a
little ground up mummy in a gift basket to take
home and you can make tea with it, or according
to a friend I trust, but I don't have the
written source he used, you can smoke it to get
high and connect with the spooky ancient dead. There was
a paint color called mummy brown that had ground up
(32:12):
mummy in it. So this is the literal deep personification
of Egyptians, right Like if someone was like, hey, I
got a bit of dead person. This like dead human flesh,
would you like some dead human flesh? You should eat
human flesh and that will be good for you people.
(32:35):
Unless you're at a Catholic church, people will be like,
that's fucking weird, why would I do that? But when
it's a mummy, it's just a spooky thing. It's a
fucking brown person. Anyway, you probably get the point. It
was Napoleon science guys, that's the technical term, who discovered
the Valley of Kings, so we owe our knowledge of
(32:57):
the first labor strike to them. It was Agypdomania that
inspired one of my favorite poems of all time, Osi
Mendeas by Percy Shelley. Egypt's specific orientalism inspired both wildly
disrespectful assholes and people genuinely interested in learning more about
the world and about humanity and improving it. But that
doesn't mean that even those people's hands are clean. The
(33:21):
Palestinian American guy who coined the word orientalism, Edward Sayid,
put it pretty clearly. Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient and the British Museum
was crucial for this. The British could go see the
glory of their empire just by going on down to
(33:42):
the museum. Look at all that knowledge we've gathered. Truly,
we're making the world a better place. I would love
to believe that science knows no borders, and one day
I think we can live in that world. We just
have to destroy borders first, and imperialism and capitalism and
white supremacy. The British mind basically couldn't fathom that modern
(34:07):
Egypt existed in the lineage of ancient Egypt. And that
sounds wild, right, But like modern Egypt in their minds,
a bad, smelly place full of ungrateful wretches, But ancient
Egypt was a magical land full of strange wisdom and
occult learnings. To quote the scholar Samantha rivenbark the Victorians
divided Egypt into quote, a glorious history and an uninteresting
(34:31):
present and said that quote British archaeologists excavating Egypt for
its ancient artifacts largely regarded contemporary Egyptians as a nuisance
or a source of unskilled labor. So yeah, it was
shit like unearthing the wonders of the world, despite the
ignorant brown masses that fueled British nationalism and empire. And
(34:54):
that's not science with its inherent if if you look
at it through uist into glasses internationalism. Instead, it's just
nationalism and chauvinism and orientalism and a lot of badisms
and not the good isms. So they were looters, they
were grave robbers, and their stolen shit is still on
(35:14):
display as trophies of their fucking victory in the British Museum.
I'm honestly grateful that the ancient Egyptians managed to rob
their own king's graves so thoroughly first thousands of years ago,
because they weren't getting paid enough to live. If I
have a thesis to this episode, it's this grave robbery
(35:35):
is cool when you steal from your own dead kings
and bad when you steal artifacts from places you're colonizing anyway,
unrelated any of that. I'm sad to say that the
gold ornamentation that Trump seems to be filling the White
House with is probably just spray painted bullshit. That's the
problem with modern plutocrats, fewer liquid assets to steal. That's
(35:58):
the end of the episodes. I hope you enjoyed hearing
about the first labor strike, and if you want to
hear more of well read more of what I have
to say. I have a newsletter. It's Margaret Kiljoy dot
substack dot com. Almost everything on there is free. There's
like more personal stuff that's for paid subscribers, only not
like in a wing quank way, but like just actually
(36:19):
just more personal writing tends to be behind a pay well,
but almost everything I say isn't. And take care of
each other. Fuck ice free Palestine. See y'all next week.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. The more podcasts and Cool Zone Media,
(36:42):
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on her radio app, ap A podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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