That village under quarantine
The untold story of the place where the secret of the pharaohs was kept
With the sudden and wide spread of the coronavirus, the popularity of the word “quarantine” is growing. People are fighting for things like the last packets of flour in supermarkets, preparing for the possibility of being stuck under a quarantine. The terrifying notion, of completely losing control over one’s own freedom and being isolated from the rest of the world, is quite common in science-fiction movies. However, it begs the question of how old this phenomenon is, especially considering that even in ancient times there were several examples of places which were under strict quarantine.
Let us travel in time
Now, I would love to invite you to join me for a quick trip back in time. We are going to visit a village that lived under quarantine for more than 450 years. Our destination is 1350 BC, Deir el-Medina, “The Place of Truth”, a small settlement in the desert, some miles away from today’s Luxor.
The people who were living in Deir el-Medina were highly appreciated workmen. They were the most gifted artists and architects in Egypt, and their mission was to build the Valley of the Kings. The details of the construction in the Valley used to be the most well-kept secret in all of Egypt. The tombs of the Kings were not just religiously important, they also presented an opportunity for pharaohs to shape their legacies, and even influence the way people thought of the Egyptian world. Of course, the goal was not always about keeping a historically accurate journal, writing down the things which happened during the reign of a pharaoh on the walls of his tomb. It was much more about building propaganda and masking the facts, so that one day they could be seen as glorious.
To keep the secrets of this process, the workmen were forbidden to have any contact with the outside world. They were not allowed to live in the work camps or their village, and nobody could enter their territory. Basic needs, such as water and food were provided for by a group appointed by the pharaoh.
This group had to live outside of the village and included woodcutters, laundry servants, fishermen, tailors, shoemakers and others. They were directly employed by the state and had to continuously deliver the goods for the needs of the villagers in Deir el-Medina. To avoid contact with the secret workmen, they had to put their supplies down in front of the city gate, where the guards made notes about the delivery and handed to the people behind the gates.
At this point in history, the amount of the literate people was extremely low in Egypt, less than 2 percent of the whole population could write and read. The workmen in Deir el-Medina belonged to this small group, they were highly educated people. This is significant, in part, because it made it possible for the detailed records they kept of their lives to be found by more modern historians. They made shopping lists, to-do lists, funny comics, they wrote diaries and they practiced bookkeeping for all of their businesses and issues in full accordance with the law. To save on expensive papyrus, they used limestone pieces to write on, enabling most of these documents to survive until present day.
The men, who crossed the line
In these documents I found something that caught my attention. There is a group of people that appears quite often in the documents of the workmen, namely, the water carries. These men held special status in this secret society, they created an opportunity for the people under quarantine to keep some contact with the outside world. The reason this was possible is probably due to the location of the water delivery. The water was carried by donkeys in huge leather sacks, the water carrier brought the water to the large water container where the workers had to pick it up by themselves. This place was the opportunity for the villagers to make some private deals with the underpaid water carriers. More than 80 documents survived in which the villagers offer tasks to the watercarriers, one of which was to mediate between them and other people, in Theban. These tasks vary quite a bit: there are men asking for a donkey, there are wives wishing for a fashionable dress and there are some who are simply selling some of their craftworks.
The water carriers had a difficult job, they needed to deliver 600–800 Liters of water from the Nile (or one of its canals), through the desert, to the secret village, daily. They were really underpaid; after paying the monthly rent of the donkey — a necessity for doing their job — nothing remained for them and their families. They seized every opportunity to earn some extra income so that at least they could provide the basics for the hungry bellies waiting for them at home. Regardless, many times they were treated harshly by the workmen, who were usually not satisfied with their services and were not willing to pay or just simply sued them at Deir el-Medina, where, in the eyes of the law, they had no rights.
The first work strike
However, this does not mean that the villagers were just bathing in honey and milk, in a manner of speaking. At one point the supplies started arriving in increasingly irregular intervals. Eventually, the workers began approaching their limits for survival.
They started the first work strike in history. They not only wrote strike letters and petitions, but also secretly began plotting a greater revenge against the State. The workmen in Deir el-Medina committed massive robberies in the Valley of the Kings, stealing and destroying much of the work that generations of secret quarantined villagers built up. At the end of the 11th century BC, almost all the workers ran away, leaving the village behind them
This is the story of the people that worked on the breathtaking monuments of ancient Egypt. Their stories are forgotten, but real and they need to be shared. They are the evidence that, thousands of years ago, there were people fighting for similar things as any of us does today.
They lived at The Place of Truth and kept the secrets of the powerful pharaohs. While knowing the Truth they were forced to document a version of reality that was more politically favorable and better for the image of the king.
