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