Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to cool people who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff. You're a reminder that as long as
Speaker 1: there has been labor, there have been labor strikes. As
Speaker 1: long as there's been wage theft, there's been road blockades,
Speaker 1: and as long as there have been bosses stealing from workers,
Speaker 1: there have been workers stealing from bosses. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy, and this week we are going back the
Speaker 1: farthest we've ever gone. Well, okay, almost the farthest. We
Speaker 1: did do an episode about the domestication of dogs and
Speaker 1: why dogs are great, and that one goes back even further,
Speaker 1: but this one goes as far back into the written
Speaker 1: record as it is possible to go, because this week
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the first labor strikes that
Speaker 1: we know about in history, the first ones that were
Speaker 1: ever written down. And with me is my guest. You
Speaker 1: you're my guest, So I invite you to speak aloud
Speaker 1: while listening to this. Interrupt me. Ask any questions that
Speaker 1: you have just wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this.
Speaker 1: I won't hear them, but it's entertaining to me to
Speaker 1: imagine you all doing that. There's no guests. This week.
Speaker 1: This is one of those ones where I just wanted
Speaker 1: to sit down and write this and get it out.
Speaker 1: So that's what I'm doing. Just like humanity, the labor
Speaker 1: movement was born in Africa, which shouldn't surprise anybody specifically.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to talk about this as the first
Speaker 1: labor strike. I actually going to make an argument that
Speaker 1: this is the first labor strike that we know about
Speaker 1: because it was written down and there's actually a decent
Speaker 1: reason to suppose that this was common elsewhere, because okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll get to it anyway, this is the first
Speaker 1: one we know about. The first strike happened in Egypt.
Speaker 1: It happened on November fourteenth, eleven fifty two BCE. That
Speaker 1: is more than three thousand years ago for those of
Speaker 1: you keeping track at home. It happened in a town
Speaker 1: of skilled workers who built the tombs for the Pharaohs,
Speaker 1: a town called Dierra al Medina, which fortunately for us,
Speaker 1: is one of the best preserved ancient towns in the world.
Speaker 1: In this case, the town was preserved because it was
Speaker 1: far enough back from the Nile that it didn't flood.
Speaker 1: People were building their houses with earth with mud, they
Speaker 1: would say, right, and so millennia. Flooding destroyed anything that
Speaker 1: the river could reach, but it couldn't reach here. And
Speaker 1: so when I say best preserved, it's not like you whatever.
Speaker 1: You can see pictures of it. It's like not totally there,
Speaker 1: but it's not not there. You know, it's doing pretty
Speaker 1: good for three thousand years. I'm not going to look
Speaker 1: so good three thousand years from now. Although this is
Speaker 1: also a story about mummies, so I guess there are
Speaker 1: people who look like mummies. I guess three thousand years later.
Speaker 1: That's besides the point. I am willing to guess that
Speaker 1: if you're not a big egypt fan, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about the complications of ancient egypt fans and Orientalism later,
Speaker 1: I'm willing to bet you who grew up being told
Speaker 1: the Pyramids were built by slave labor. I grew up
Speaker 1: being told that the Pyramids were built by slave labor.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're lucky you got told that versus Aliens.
Speaker 1: But I just sort of assumed that any other Egyptian
Speaker 1: tomb had been too. But the thing is, slave labor
Speaker 1: wasn't involved in any of these things. We tend to
Speaker 1: have this flattened, simplified understanding of the past, of the
Speaker 1: ancient world, and in order to understand the origins of labor,
Speaker 1: of wages, of strikes, of organizing, we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: unflatten everything. We're going to have to do context my
Speaker 1: favorite thing. But don't worry, it'll be fun. This context
Speaker 1: is going to include ancient dream interpretations and it has
Speaker 1: grave robbers who were stealing from work, so can't go
Speaker 1: wrong with that. All right, we're gonna talk about ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: There is a problem. We're going to talk about it
Speaker 1: again at the end when we talk about Orientalism. There
Speaker 1: is a problem with the way that people distinguish between
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt and modern Egypt as if they are like
Speaker 1: completely separate, you know. And it's used basically by the
Speaker 1: British to sort of justify stealing all the artifacts and
Speaker 1: all that shit, because they're like, oh, it's like a
Speaker 1: totally different thing, and it's not. But obviously ancient Egypt,
Speaker 1: with hieroglyphics and shit, is different than modern Egypt. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about ancient Egypt. Egypt has been around for
Speaker 1: a really long time. It is more or less the
Speaker 1: oldest thing still going that we know of the oldest country.
Speaker 1: You could say people have been living there since six
Speaker 1: thousand BCE, and the first ruler of the region cropped
Speaker 1: up around thirty one hundred BCE, conquering the whole the
Speaker 1: Nile River, at least the parts you could take a
Speaker 1: boat up. Even ancient Egypt is a sort of meaninglessly
Speaker 1: broad phrase. It changed a lot over the millennium. You've
Speaker 1: got prehistoric Egypt, that is, you know, before we have
Speaker 1: history aka writing, we don't know as much about it.
Speaker 1: You've got the three kingdom periods, the Old Kingdom, the
Speaker 1: Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. You can probably figure
Speaker 1: out which ones came when those kingdoms were relatively stable,
Speaker 1: And in between those various kingdoms you have these unstable
Speaker 1: periods called the intermediate periods. The Old Kingdom starts about
Speaker 1: three hundred years or so after the founding of Egypt,
Speaker 1: and it runs from two six eight six BCE to
Speaker 1: twenty one eighty one BCE. And don't worry, there is
Speaker 1: not a test on these dates at the end. Personally,
Speaker 1: I only find actual dates interesting when you can use
Speaker 1: them to cross reference stuff and position things in relation
Speaker 1: to each other. It's part of why I actually didn't
Speaker 1: care much about the way I learned history in school.
Speaker 1: It was taught in a way that just flowed right
Speaker 1: over me with names and dates. And names and dates
Speaker 1: are great, stories are better. They stick in my brain more.
Speaker 1: I only care about the names and dates once I
Speaker 1: have the story and realize why I should care. In
Speaker 1: the Old Kingdom, the pharaohs the king's slash queens the
Speaker 1: people who ruled right. They were the head priest, the
Speaker 1: commander in chief of the military, and the owner of
Speaker 1: all of the lands. They were the ruler of all
Speaker 1: the people, and according to some interpretations and not others,
Speaker 1: they were the only people who got an afterlife. They
Speaker 1: got big old tombs as a result of that, and
Speaker 1: most sources say only the Pharaohs got an afterlife, but
Speaker 1: I think that might be slightly outdated because in early
Speaker 1: twenty ten new tombs of pyramid workers were uncovered and
Speaker 1: they had some grave goods. They had jars of beer
Speaker 1: and bread buried with them to serve them in the afterlife,
Speaker 1: so they probably had an afterlife. Now, Okay, I am
Speaker 1: doing an episode, like always, especially when you do the
Speaker 1: ancient world, I am doing an episode that is a
Speaker 1: thing that people have dedicated centuries to studying, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I read a lot about this really quickly, so you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not the world's leading egyptologist, and I also sort
Speaker 1: of hate that word, so we'll talk about in the
Speaker 1: Orientalism section. Anyway, it was the first pharaoh of the
Speaker 1: Old Kingdom who started the whole pyramid thing. Not a
Speaker 1: pyramid scheme, just a pyramid to be buried under, although
Speaker 1: you could sort of argue that monarchy is a pyramid scheme.
Speaker 1: This particular pharaoh, his name was Joseph. He was the
Speaker 1: first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, the second pharaoh of
Speaker 1: the Third dynasty, and he had a step pyramid built
Speaker 1: for himself. The smooth sided pyramids at Giza, like with
Speaker 1: the famous big Pyramids, are also from the Old Kingdom,
Speaker 1: as is the famous Sphinx. Then you've got the Middle
Speaker 1: Kingdom from twenty fifty five BCE to sixteen fifty BCE,
Speaker 1: and in that one the upper classes like nobles and
Speaker 1: priests and shit started having a lot more of a
Speaker 1: say and more independence. And this is really interesting to
Speaker 1: me because this is a pattern that we are going
Speaker 1: to see replicated later with monarchy in say Europe, you
Speaker 1: know where you start off with these like while you
Speaker 1: start off with these very kind of low level kings
Speaker 1: who are almost coming out of a vaguely democratic thing,
Speaker 1: and then they start building up to more and more
Speaker 1: centralized power. And then underneath the centralized power you have
Speaker 1: like the rich and the rich who aren't necessarily nobility,
Speaker 1: start being like, but I want some power, And that's
Speaker 1: where all the anti monarchy stuff comes from. Quite unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it was a lateral move in which the bourgeoisie took
Speaker 1: power from the monarchs, and we're actually better able to
Speaker 1: not just centralized power, but exert power, like have power
Speaker 1: go further out from the core of their society. So
Speaker 1: they were actually better able to fuck up people's lives,
Speaker 1: which is why I was a lot to remove. Even
Speaker 1: though it seems like it'd be better to have oligarchs
Speaker 1: than kings, it turns out it both kind of suck. Anyway.
Speaker 1: I just think it's interesting that we'll see patterns just
Speaker 1: repeat themselves over and over again throughout civilizations, you know,
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of years ago. So in the Middle Kingdom,
Speaker 1: the upper classes, like the nobles and priests started having
Speaker 1: more of a say and more independence, and they started
Speaker 1: getting fancier burials, and it's this period. Then we started
Speaker 1: getting literature from like the Coffin texts, which we'll talk
Speaker 1: about later, but their architecture didn't hold up as well
Speaker 1: and wasn't as spectacular as the Old Kingdom. Then there's
Speaker 1: the New Kingdom from fifteen fifty BCE to ten seventy BCE.
Speaker 1: By this point the pharaohs were like, you know what,
Speaker 1: we don't actually need whole pyramids. You can just put
Speaker 1: us in the valley of kings and big old rock
Speaker 1: tombs that are kind of underground. And I don't think
Speaker 1: they did this because they were less arrogant than the
Speaker 1: kings and queens of old, because plenty of the pharaohs
Speaker 1: were women, as we'll get to, not like fifty to fifty,
Speaker 1: but a fair number of them. But rather they did
Speaker 1: this because grave robbers were organized and persistent, so it
Speaker 1: was easier to have a more remote, hidden, underground place
Speaker 1: where you could centralize your security. And by the time
Speaker 1: we're in the New Kingdom, more and more people wanted
Speaker 1: fancy funerals, and the workers who built all their tombs
Speaker 1: were in fact free people inasmuch as anyone was free.
Speaker 1: But before we talk about them. We should talk about
Speaker 1: people who aren't free, But do you know what, before
Speaker 1: we talk about even that, we should talk about the
Speaker 1: products and services that support the show. And we're back
Speaker 1: when I say that the people who built the pyramids
Speaker 1: and the tombs were free people, and as much as
Speaker 1: anyone was free, this is not to say that Egypt
Speaker 1: didn't have slavery. If you've been listening to the show
Speaker 1: for a lot, especially in the past years I've explored
Speaker 1: the ancient world, you're likely tired of hearing me say, well,
Speaker 1: they had slavery. But it's not like you think. You're
Speaker 1: likely tired of hearing me say the racialized chattel slavery
Speaker 1: the American South was a unique evil that stands out
Speaker 1: in history. But I've got to say both those things
Speaker 1: again here. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies, especially Rome,
Speaker 1: which honestly kind of matches America. It's not the same
Speaker 1: as the American South and how it did slavery. It's
Speaker 1: like a different way of doing it, but it was
Speaker 1: like fucking bad anyway. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies.
Speaker 1: Their economies were built on slavery. Rome, in particular, required
Speaker 1: a state of constant war to continue to enslave more
Speaker 1: and more people to work the fields and the mines
Speaker 1: and the houses of the wealthy. Slavery has been found
Speaker 1: all over the world across millennia, though was also far
Speaker 1: from universally practiced. Anyone who tries to sell you on
Speaker 1: a simple idea of what non civilized people did versus
Speaker 1: what civilized people did is trying to sell you on
Speaker 1: this or that ideology built an outdated anthropology. See the
Speaker 1: book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David
Speaker 1: Wengrow the Davids, as we like to call them in
Speaker 1: this household for more about that. But basically, some groups
Speaker 1: of people did slavery and some groups didn't, and even
Speaker 1: those societies that practiced slavery did so wildly different from
Speaker 1: one another. The slavery of the Ottoman Empire, where civil
Speaker 1: servants and bureaucrats were owned by the empire itself, was
Speaker 1: entirely different from the American South with its famous racialized
Speaker 1: chattel slavery, which was entirely different from the serfdom common
Speaker 1: across medieval Europe and Renaissance Russia, where peasants were considered
Speaker 1: part of the property of the land and lived comparatively
Speaker 1: free lives, but were not free to travel or kind
Speaker 1: of self determine their lives. And even those descriptions are
Speaker 1: over simplifications of complex situations that changed decade to decade
Speaker 1: region to region. Ancient Egypt, slavery was I can't even
Speaker 1: really say relatively benign because it's slavery, so it wasn't.
Speaker 1: But in the scale of unfathomable evil, which gets infinitely deep,
Speaker 1: this was still unfathomably evil, just way less unfathomably so
Speaker 1: almost fathomably fathomable. Fath of enslave people in Egypt were
Speaker 1: like the rest of the ancient world, mostly people who
Speaker 1: were captured in warfare, caught doing some crime, or were debtors.
Speaker 1: Debtors would choose and I think they get scare quotes
Speaker 1: to sell themselves off to cover their debts, which didn't
Speaker 1: work out great, I think because at that point your
Speaker 1: family and kids are now enslaved too, because it was
Speaker 1: a hereditary condition. If your mother was enslaved when you
Speaker 1: gave birth to you, you were born in slave too.
Speaker 1: But also we see this elsewhere too, But in Egypt,
Speaker 1: poor people sometimes sold themselves and therefore their families into slavery,
Speaker 1: because being free and broke often starving to death, while
Speaker 1: if you were owned, there was someone who was responsible
Speaker 1: for you. This doesn't make it good, but in a
Speaker 1: world in which everyone is some degree of unfree, many
Speaker 1: people chose to enter involuntary servitude rather than starve. It
Speaker 1: was for some a method of social mobility. Temples in
Speaker 1: particular often owned the people who worked there, and in fact,
Speaker 1: sometimes for like a brief period kind of later in
Speaker 1: the late BCE, like the Near Ce part of BCE,
Speaker 1: a lot of people didn't just sell themselves into slavery.
Speaker 1: They paid a monthly fee for the privilege of being enslaved.
Speaker 1: Because in ancient Egypt and up until the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: I think I don't know as much about like medieval Egypt,
Speaker 1: and it relates to this, it relied heavily on CorV labor,
Speaker 1: which is basically labor as tax. You can think of
Speaker 1: it as like, ah, I owe the king three sheep
Speaker 1: and to two months. I'm making those numbers up. They
Speaker 1: have no really to reality. Or you can think of
Speaker 1: it like the mandatory military service, only it's for public works.
Speaker 1: It's been a while since i've been there, But I
Speaker 1: remember in Finland being told, like, you know, when you
Speaker 1: turn eighteen you can either do one year in the
Speaker 1: military or two years in public service. So but think
Speaker 1: of that, only it's not just like once when you
Speaker 1: turn eighteen and so kind of recently there's there's still
Speaker 1: new things people are learning, finding old papyrieye papyri I
Speaker 1: don't know, and translating them. A recent papyrus translation is
Speaker 1: a contract that reads quote, I am your servant from
Speaker 1: this day onwards, and I shall pay two and a
Speaker 1: half copper pieces every month as my slave fee before
Speaker 1: sokenebtunis the great God. So that was like the contract
Speaker 1: of someone who sold themselves into slavery or paid to
Speaker 1: opposite of sold whatever I already covered it. They probably
Speaker 1: paid that fee by doing wage labor elsewhere, like a
Speaker 1: second gig after their primary job. And they probably did
Speaker 1: this to avoid the core vla that was just way
Speaker 1: way rougher of a life than being owned by a temple.
Speaker 1: This probably wasn't a long standing practice. We only have
Speaker 1: evidence of it happening from one ninety BCE to one
Speaker 1: thirty BCE, and that's well after the rest of this
Speaker 1: week's story. Takes place. I still found it interesting, and
Speaker 1: I've been thinking a lot because I've been doing all
Speaker 1: of these ancient episodes, I've been thinking a lot about
Speaker 1: freedom and how all throughout history up to including the
Speaker 1: present day, we're all in some sort of sliding scale
Speaker 1: of unfreedom. There's people who've like done a bunch of
Speaker 1: time in prison who will talk about the outside world
Speaker 1: as minimum security prison because like, you're still being surveilled
Speaker 1: and policed, and at any point they can take you
Speaker 1: away to the higher security prison. And you know, there's
Speaker 1: the whole like, none of us are free until everyone
Speaker 1: is free. The fact that our quote unquote freedom is
Speaker 1: a thing that could be taken away from us so
Speaker 1: easily really indicates that we're not free. Early anti capitalists,
Speaker 1: including the formerly enslaved woman Lucy Parsons, refer to wage
Speaker 1: labor as wage slavery because your choice was work and
Speaker 1: build the wealth of your boss or starve. It always
Speaker 1: struck me as an insensitive phrasing, so I tend not
Speaker 1: to use wage slavery as a phrasing. But honestly, once
Speaker 1: I understood a more expansive look at freedom and unfreedom,
Speaker 1: I kind of get it, Like Theoretically, in an idealized
Speaker 1: understanding of the world, your boss should never be able
Speaker 1: to just talk down to you or treat you as
Speaker 1: a lesser because you've made an arrangement with them and
Speaker 1: which you freely agree to trade labor for a wage,
Speaker 1: you're still peers. Yet in practice, so many bosses treat
Speaker 1: their workers like shit. Yell at them, get mad at them,
Speaker 1: be like you're don't do the thing right. That's not
Speaker 1: how you talk to your peer. Most bosses will treat
Speaker 1: subordinates just subordinates in terms of a work structure, but
Speaker 1: socially because workers are fundamentally less free than employers in
Speaker 1: our society, which believes in the central myth of capitalism
Speaker 1: of free associations and contracts between people. Yet that's not
Speaker 1: what's happening. There's never been a binary between free and unfree,
Speaker 1: and I think it's important to understand that in order
Speaker 1: to understand someone who decides to sell themselves and therefore
Speaker 1: they're family into the permanent service of someone wealthy in
Speaker 1: order to be taken care of. It's like joining the
Speaker 1: army or a nunnery, basically saying like, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: going to be part of this larger unit that will
Speaker 1: take care of me. But I'm going to do it
Speaker 1: in a subordinate way because that's my option. I am
Speaker 1: not saying that this is a good way to structure society.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that this is a way that society has
Speaker 1: been into some degree is structured still. People in ancient Egypt,
Speaker 1: before they really kind of start hanging out with the Greeks,
Speaker 1: who are way into worse slavery, people enslaved in ancient
Speaker 1: Egypt could still own property and get married. I read
Speaker 1: one source that claims that people could buy their own freedom,
Speaker 1: but another sources there's simply no record of that ever happening.
Speaker 1: But it was possible for them to kind of advance
Speaker 1: up the social ladder without being freed, and many were
Speaker 1: freed by their owners. People still escaped, and as we
Speaker 1: talked about in episodes about ancient Greece, basically some of
Speaker 1: the first international treaties were you have to give your
Speaker 1: runaway slaves back. In particular, the first known peace treaty
Speaker 1: in history, from the twelfth century BCE, was between Ramses
Speaker 1: the Second from Egypt and the Hittites from the Assyrian
Speaker 1: Peninsula aka modern Turkey. That treaty included this quote. If
Speaker 1: a man or two men who are unknown flee, and
Speaker 1: if they escape from the country of Egypt, and if
Speaker 1: they don't want to serve him, then Hatusili the great King,
Speaker 1: the king of the country of Hati, has to deliver
Speaker 1: them into his brother's hands, and he shall not allow
Speaker 1: them to inhabit the country of Hati. You got to
Speaker 1: give the runaway and slave people back. We talk sometimes
Speaker 1: about how the concept of the police force in the
Speaker 1: modern sense was largely developed out of slave catcher societies
Speaker 1: in the United States, but it's worth understanding that the
Speaker 1: development of law, of borders and of international treaties also
Speaker 1: develop out of the same urge to hold on to
Speaker 1: private property, which for most of the history of civilization
Speaker 1: hinged around the ownership of people. Because people create all value,
Speaker 1: so owning people is the best way to generate value without,
Speaker 1: you know, working. Now we've discovered wage labor, which is
Speaker 1: another good way to do it, although they also would
Speaker 1: wage labor back then. Whatever, Okay. Maybe the most important
Speaker 1: difference though, was that compared to Greece or especially to Rome,
Speaker 1: both of which came way later, Egypt's economy didn't run
Speaker 1: on slave labor. It was a really complex web of
Speaker 1: people who are in some ways free and in other
Speaker 1: ways not. Much like I am both free and unfree
Speaker 1: when it comes to my job obligations like pivoting to
Speaker 1: ads and we're back. Essentially, everyone underneath the pharaoh was
Speaker 1: in some condition of being unfree. In ancient Egypt, most
Speaker 1: of the peasants were tied to the land they lived on,
Speaker 1: much like later serfdom, but this was less of a
Speaker 1: legal rule and more of a social rule. People were
Speaker 1: born into their jobs. Your dad does a thing, you're
Speaker 1: gonna do the thing. And as for those big, massive
Speaker 1: infrastructure projects, the one that still stand today, the ones
Speaker 1: that people from all over the world are fascinated by,
Speaker 1: they weren't built by enslaved people. They are built by
Speaker 1: cor v labor and wage labor. The myth of them
Speaker 1: being created by slave labor, though, is ancient. We're not
Speaker 1: like uniquely foolish. Usually you can blame every misunderstanding of
Speaker 1: the past on the Victorians, but sometimes you can blame
Speaker 1: it on the Greeks, because it goes back to Herodotus,
Speaker 1: a Greek who lived in much more of a slave society.
Speaker 1: I think he just made an assumption based on his
Speaker 1: own culture. The myth continued to pick up steam in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven when former Israeli Prime Minister Menichem Begen
Speaker 1: claimed that it was Jews who built the Pyramids, that
Speaker 1: they were built by enslaved Israelites, but this was debunked
Speaker 1: by another Israelian Israeli archaeologist, Amahai Mazar, who put it bluntly,
Speaker 1: quote no Jews built the Pyramids because Jews didn't exist
Speaker 1: at the period when the pyramids were built. A German egyptologist,
Speaker 1: Dietzer Wildung said about the slave myth to the Guardian, quote,
Speaker 1: the world simply could not believe the pyramids were built
Speaker 1: without oppression and forced labor, but out of loyalty to
Speaker 1: the pharaohs. The pyramids were massive undertakings. Ten thousand workers
Speaker 1: worked for more than thirty years on a single one.
Speaker 1: They were recruited from poor areas. They worked in three
Speaker 1: month shifts. They were well fed and got to eat
Speaker 1: meat eat regularly. Most people didn't get to eat meat regularly.
Speaker 1: They mostly grain and vegetables, with some fish and rarely
Speaker 1: some meat. Best as I can put together, and the
Speaker 1: workers who died on site doing this work, they were
Speaker 1: buried on site as a sign of respect. Their heads
Speaker 1: were pointed west, their feet were pointed east in religious custom,
Speaker 1: and they, you know, were buried with bread and with beer.
Speaker 1: They also worked really fucking hard and died young. I
Speaker 1: personally find that they did it because they loved the Pharaoh.
Speaker 1: Thing a little bit hard to swallow. But I might
Speaker 1: be wrong, because that's what multiple experts have written and
Speaker 1: they know more than me. I'm probably just not thinking
Speaker 1: of it in terms of the Egyptian theology properly. But
Speaker 1: I've read other things that suggested the Pyramids were built
Speaker 1: by core v labor, which again is basically labor as tax,
Speaker 1: and even if it were regular wage labor, and someone
Speaker 1: knows the answer to this, and I just read multiple
Speaker 1: things that contradicted each other. When poor people take back breaking,
Speaker 1: seasonal jobs that pay way better than anything else, that's
Speaker 1: a tale as old as time, and it's free within
Speaker 1: a certain understanding of free. The people who work in
Speaker 1: those pop up fracking towns aren't doing it because they
Speaker 1: love America, but because it's tremendously difficult, dangerous labor that
Speaker 1: pays so much better than other blue collar work. So
Speaker 1: that's like where I think about it, but again I'm
Speaker 1: probably wrong. However they were built, it wasn't by enslaved people.
Speaker 1: The pyramids got built. But that's the Old Kingdom, and
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about the New Kingdom this week.
Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about a worker's town near
Speaker 1: the Valley of Kings in the Valley of Queens. We
Speaker 1: are going to be talking about Deir el Medina. Dierra
Speaker 1: el Medina was a whole town built up around workers
Speaker 1: who built and filled the tombs of royalty in the
Speaker 1: Valley of Kings in the Valley of Queens. The city's name,
Speaker 1: the current name that we use for it, is Arabic.
Speaker 1: It means the monastery of the city, but it was
Speaker 1: known at the time as Podemi the Town, or Setma
Speaker 1: the place of Truth. Podemi was probably its informal name,
Speaker 1: in Setma was its formal name. I love that it's
Speaker 1: the place of truth. That's fucking metal. The famous king
Speaker 1: tut Pharaoh tut uncommon was buried there. His tomb is
Speaker 1: kind of small as far as pharaoh tombs go. It's
Speaker 1: mostly just famous because it was opened by British grave robbers,
Speaker 1: the kind of fancy degrees who don't call themselves grave robbers.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty two, here's what the famous British grave
Speaker 1: robber Howard Carter wrote about finding the place quote. At
Speaker 1: first I could see nothing. The hot air escaping from
Speaker 1: the chamber caused the candle flames to flicker. But presently,
Speaker 1: as my eyes grow accustomed to the light, details of
Speaker 1: the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals,
Speaker 1: statues in gold. Everywhere was the glint of gold for
Speaker 1: a moment, an eternity, it must have seemed to the
Speaker 1: other standing by. I was dumb with amazement. And when
Speaker 1: Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously,
Speaker 1: can you see anything? It was all I could do
Speaker 1: to get out the words, yes, wonderful things. The royal
Speaker 1: seal on the door was found intact. The first three
Speaker 1: chambers were unadorned, with evidence of early entrance through one
Speaker 1: of the outside walls. The next chamber contained most of
Speaker 1: the funery objects. The sarcophagus was four gilded wooden shrines,
Speaker 1: one inside the other, within which lay the stone sarcophagus,
Speaker 1: three mummiform coffins, the inner one being solid gold, and
Speaker 1: then the mummy haste can be seen in the reliefs
Speaker 1: and the sarcophagus due to the fact that Tutukanhaman died
Speaker 1: at only nineteen years of age, following a brief reign.
Speaker 1: Though extremely impressive to the modern world, the treasurers of
Speaker 1: Tutucahaman must have paled when compared to the great pharaohs
Speaker 1: that ruled for many years during Egypt's Golden Age. And
Speaker 1: that's what a grave robber had to say about finding
Speaker 1: this place in the Valley of Kings, which only got
Speaker 1: unearthed around that time, the whole Valley of Kings, And
Speaker 1: we know more about the city that built this than
Speaker 1: kind of any other town like it in the ancient world.
Speaker 1: I like the way that a write up from Murray
Speaker 1: Parsons and toryegypt dot Net put it, and toriegypt Net
Speaker 1: is a shockingly up to date and thorough source, although
Speaker 1: you know it's also trying to sell you tours. So
Speaker 1: the image of hundreds, perhaps thousands of toiling slaves whipped
Speaker 1: by overseers seems seared into the modern consciousness, and everyone
Speaker 1: is convinced that the despots who ruled Egypt with iron,
Speaker 1: greedy fists must have built their wealth and glory on
Speaker 1: the bleeding backs of this tortured labor. Nothing can be
Speaker 1: farther from the truth, except perhaps that aliens and spaceships
Speaker 1: pressed a button and built the Giza Complex and the
Speaker 1: other great monuments. The more work being done on these
Speaker 1: villages sounds a clear message that while they worked hard,
Speaker 1: these villages were made up of mostly free and willing
Speaker 1: citizens doing their part to ensure the afterlife of their king.
Speaker 1: But here I'm no longer quoting here. I want to
Speaker 1: go on a side, me in a side. This is shocking.
Speaker 1: You see, whenever I see something called the Valley of
Speaker 1: Kings and another thing called the Valley of Queens, I
Speaker 1: want to know more. I'm interested in gender. Best as
Speaker 1: I can tell, the Valley of Kings was for the pharaohs,
Speaker 1: the actual rulers. Most of them were men, but not
Speaker 1: nearly as many as you'd assume, and so there's women
Speaker 1: buried in the Valley of Kings. The Valley of Queens
Speaker 1: was for the non ruling queens, and for the princes,
Speaker 1: and for the high ranking people of whatever gender who
Speaker 1: just happened not to be the ruler. I spent a
Speaker 1: little while trying to figure out if the Valley of
Speaker 1: the Kings and Queens were named by the people who
Speaker 1: built them, or if that's a modern appellation. But I
Speaker 1: didn't find an answer. We straight up don't know how
Speaker 1: many pharaohs were women, but we know it's way more
Speaker 1: than most people would guess. Sometimes the pharaohs, in order
Speaker 1: to be taken seriously, just call themselves men. Other times
Speaker 1: history remembers women as queens instead of pharaohs, leaving historians
Speaker 1: unsure if they ruled by themselves or if they had
Speaker 1: a guy with them. We know that succession could go
Speaker 1: to a woman, but it generally preferred men. So like
Speaker 1: if you're you know, got two kids, your son gets
Speaker 1: it if they're both genders, but if you got two daughters,
Speaker 1: gets to a daughter. You know, women were, like a
Speaker 1: lot of later monarchies, kind of the last choice to
Speaker 1: keep a dynasty going, or a lot of queens would
Speaker 1: rule after their husbands died. We know about hot Shepsut,
Speaker 1: who has the word she right there in her name.
Speaker 1: Well you can't hear it, but it's in the spelling.
Speaker 1: She was in charge for fifteen years fourteen seventy three
Speaker 1: BCE to fourteen fifty eight BCE. Again, there's no quiz
Speaker 1: on these states. She was married to her half brother
Speaker 1: Futmost the second, so her infant son inherited the throne,
Speaker 1: but she ruled first as the regent, but eventually she
Speaker 1: was like, not fuck that kid, I'm in charge. And
Speaker 1: she was a war leader and did a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1: And in early depictions of her, she's presented as a woman,
Speaker 1: but slowly the art about her starts changing, and in
Speaker 1: the sculptures and the engravings, she's wearing men's clothing, and
Speaker 1: then eventually she has the beard that pharaohs symbolically wear,
Speaker 1: and she starts even going by the masculine version of
Speaker 1: her name, Hotshepsu. As soon as she died, her step son,
Speaker 1: Thutmouse the third or is I'll call him thot Mouse,
Speaker 1: the ungrateful patriarchal asshole, just like erased her name from everything. Okay,
Speaker 1: not just as soon as she died, but later in
Speaker 1: his reign he starts erasing her name from everything he can.
Speaker 1: He tries to erase her from history because he wanted
Speaker 1: to legitimize his own son as heir. It probably actually
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with gender, or did it. Then
Speaker 1: there's Nefertiti, who's famous because the grave robber Ludor Chart
Speaker 1: found a bust of her that I'm sure you've seen,
Speaker 1: even if you don't realize it. Never Tidy was queen,
Speaker 1: not pharaoh, during maybe the most prosperous period of Egypt's history,
Speaker 1: and historians like to argue about whether or not she
Speaker 1: ruled for a while after her husband died, so she
Speaker 1: was like the pharaoh who might have been a pharaoh,
Speaker 1: but people argue about whether or not she got to.
Speaker 1: Then there's Tawerzette, who was buried in the Valley of
Speaker 1: Kings after ruling for a few years after her husband,
Speaker 1: the pharaoh died. And then there's Netherkret, who might have
Speaker 1: been the first woman to be a pharaoh, though I
Speaker 1: read really contradictory sources about her. Some say that all
Speaker 1: the records called her a man, Some say that she
Speaker 1: probably never existed. Others says she definitely existed and might
Speaker 1: not have ruled whatever. But I really like the story
Speaker 1: about her. The famously often incorrect ancient Greek Herodotus, the
Speaker 1: one who was wrong about a thing in the past.
Speaker 1: Earlier in this story, he has a wild story about
Speaker 1: netherket In that tale, she came to the throne after
Speaker 1: an angry mob killed her brother and her on the
Speaker 1: throne instead. But she wasn't happy, She wasn't grateful, She
Speaker 1: wasn't happy that people killed her brother. So, to quote Herodotus,
Speaker 1: determined to avenge his death, she devised a cunning scheme
Speaker 1: by which she destroyed a vast number of Egyptians. She
Speaker 1: constructed a spacious underground chamber, and on the pretense of
Speaker 1: inaugurating it through a banquet, inviting all those whom she
Speaker 1: knew to have been responsible for the murder of her brother, suddenly,
Speaker 1: as they were feasting, she let the river in upon
Speaker 1: them by means of a large secret duct. And then
Speaker 1: later in that story, she kills herself by running into
Speaker 1: a burning room. The past is so metal. Then, of
Speaker 1: course there's the most famous woman Pharaoh, Cleopatra. She's famous
Speaker 1: mostly because she came really late on the scene when
Speaker 1: the Romans were doing their thing, and actually, you know,
Speaker 1: eventually the Romans take over whatever. Okay, But she was
Speaker 1: Cleopatra the seventh, which means that there were six ruling
Speaker 1: women named Cleopatra, some of whom ruled out rites, some
Speaker 1: alongside their husbands who came before her. So yeah, pharaoh's
Speaker 1: of any gender during some chunk of the new kingdom
Speaker 1: went into the valley of kings. Queens who didn't rule
Speaker 1: went to the valley of queens, these temples and tombs,
Speaker 1: which were sort of public works projects in their way,
Speaker 1: because as best as I can tell, in these old kingdoms,
Speaker 1: the ruler is the state. They were built by skilled workers,
Speaker 1: and those skilled workers, like I told you, ended up
Speaker 1: going on strike and ended up blockading roads and doing
Speaker 1: sit ins and threatening sabotage and just doing all the
Speaker 1: stuff that modern workers do. And those workers and their
Speaker 1: strength I'm going to tell you about in part two
Speaker 1: on Wednesday. Yep, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I have
Speaker 1: a newsletter. I write a bunch of stuff on it
Speaker 1: about preparedness, about history, about being queer, whatever, bullshit. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's good. Almost all this is free. You
Speaker 1: should check it out buy home. Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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