Village Life in Ancient Egypt

"Yes. Village Life in Ancient Egypt is a collection of translations and is one of my favourites. So much of what we look at is high status, from elite contexts, but what we have here are texts coming from the day-to-day life in a village, from a daily context. They come from Deir el-Medina, the village of workmen who constructed the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Perhaps the work they were doing meant that there were such high literacy levels in the village. This seems exceptional but it is hard to properly assess because we don’t have much comparable evidence from other ordinary villages. This community not only left houses and tombs but also thousands and thousands of texts written on pieces of pottery and limestone; these were like scraps of paper for them. The site of their village is open to tourists and you can see the huge pit where these texts were buried. They are written in a cursive form of hieroglyphs called hieratic – the same signs but in a reduced and cursive form. Hieratic is even harder to read than hieroglyphs; it is a very particular skill! No, it looks as if they just threw them away. It’s hard to get water in the village – you had to go to the Nile, and that’s quite a donkey ride. It appears as though they tried to dig a well and kept digging and digging but didn’t reach water so they just used it as a rubbish tip instead. Some of these scraps of pottery, called ‘ostraca’, are housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, some are in the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and all over the world really. There are thousands still waiting to be looked at and published. They say all sorts of things. There are all kinds of little notes and letters. ‘Please make me a new pair of sandals’; ‘Why haven’t you answered my message, I wrote to you a week ago!’ There are divorces, records of women running away from their husbands and then the family coming to beat up the offending husband, petty legal disputes about property and inheritance, laundry lists, grocery lists, the day to day notes we write to ourselves, stories, literary tales, love poetry. McDowell also includes texts from more monumental contexts such as the hymns and prayers set up in the villagers’ tombs and shrines. You get a vivid sense of individuals and a community, what they were like, what they cared about. We can never fully understand lived experience in Ancient Egypt, but these texts allow us the feeling that they dealt with some of the same problems, concerns, crises, and joys we all deal with. Without material like this a connection is hard to get. The art makes them look so different and the texts, especially religious texts, can seem so obscure and strange. But this is the nitty gritty and some of it is really funny – the legalese and the pedantry."