Quick questions on Women, scribes, artisans and workers in New Kingdom Egyptian society (HSC Ancient History Section II)

The Great Royal Wife. The pharaoh's principal consort (Hemet Nesut Weret) outranked all his other wives, appeared beside him on temple and tomb reliefs, and, if the heir was a minor, could act as regent. Below her sat secondary wives, foreign princesses married in for diplomacy, and the women of the royal harem institutions.

Literacy was rare, plausibly limited to a small minority of the population, which made scribes a genuinely privileged class regardless of birth. Training took place in temple "houses of life" or by direct apprenticeship, and a qualified scribe was exempted from the manual labour, corvee obligations and much of the military service that fell on unskilled workers. Egyptian pedagogical culture reinforced this: the Satire of the Trades (Instruction of Khety), a Middle Kingdom composition still copied by New Kingdom scribal pupils, mocked every manual occupation in turn (the metalworker "stinks worse than fish roe," the farmer is "in rags") to argue that nothing compared to the scribal life. Because literacy, not birth alone, opened the path into administration, from temple and estate accounts up to the vizierate, the scribal profession offered genuine social mobility to a capable man.

The specialist artisans who cut and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived in a purpose-built, walled village, Deir el-Medina, on the Theban west bank, conventionally founded early in the Eighteenth Dynasty. The workforce was organised into two "sides" (right and left), each under a foreman ("Chief of the Gang"), and worked an eight-day "week" with rest days. Crucially, workmen were paid in state-supplied rations, chiefly grain, but also fish, vegetables, wood and water, rather than money, a privileged and closely administered arrangement reflecting the crown's investment in secrecy and skill for its most important building project. The community developed a strong collective identity, expressed in its special veneration of Amenhotep I and the deified Ahmose-Nefertari as village patron deities.

The pharaoh's principal consort (Hemet Nesut Weret) outranked all his other wives, appeared beside him on temple and tomb reliefs, and, if the heir was a minor, could act as regent. Below her sat secondary wives, foreign princesses married in for diplomacy, and the women of the royal harem institutions.

A senior religious office at the temple of Karnak, held by a royal woman who assisted the high priest in ritual (including a purification role sometimes described as the god's "hand") and controlled her own endowed estate and staff. Ahmose-Nefertari, chief wife of Ahmose I and mother of Amenhotep I, is the first New Kingdom holder prominently attested: the Donation Stela of Ahmose I records land and personnel granted to fund the office for her and her descendants. After her death Ahmose-Nefertari was deified, worshipped for centuries as a patron of the Theban Necropolis and especially venerated by the community at Deir el-Medina alongside her son Amenhotep I.

Amenhotep III's Great Royal Wife (reign c. 1390-1353 BC) is the clearest example of a royal woman reaching unusual prominence. She was not born royal: her parents, Yuya and Tjuyu, were provincial officials whose well-preserved tomb (KV46) in the Valley of the Kings shows the wealth a royal marriage could bring a non-royal family.