Quick questions on Social structure in Ramesside Egypt: women, workers, strikes and tomb robbery (HSC Ancient History Section II)

The Ramesside kings maintained several ranked wives at once (a senior "Great Royal Wife" alongside secondary consorts in the royal harem), and the office of Great Royal Wife carried genuine public and ceremonial weight even though it was not usually a governing role.

Non-royal Egyptian women held formal legal capacities unusually strong by the standards of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: they could own and inherit property, buy and sell, initiate lawsuits, and obtain divorce, without needing a male guardian to act on their behalf.

The later Ramesside period, especially from Ramesses III onward, produced Egypt's best-documented evidence of state and social strain.

Roughly 68 to 70 houses stood inside an enclosure wall, home to the workmen and their families, a specialist, tax-exempt community founded to supply a reliable, secure workforce for the royal necropolis.

The crew was organised into two "sides," right and left, each led by a foreman (reis), a senior skilled workman whose post could pass from father to son, assisted by a deputy. A senior administrative official, the Scribe of the Tomb (Ramose served for decades under Ramesses II; Dhutmose held the post later in the 20th Dynasty), kept a daily journal recording absences, rations and disputes, and reported up through the vizier.

Full literacy was probably confined to scribes and a minority of senior workmen, but the volume of surviving ostraca shows functional literacy reached well beyond that circle. The scribe Qenherkhepshef (Naunakhte's first husband) assembled a private library of more than forty papyri, medical, legal, literary and magical texts, showing literacy at Deir el-Medina extended to private book ownership, not merely official record-keeping.

In Year 29 of Ramesses III's reign (mid-1150s BC), the Turin Strike Papyrus and related ostraca record the Deir el-Medina crew twice walking off the job because their grain rations were late and short. The workmen marched to the rear enclosure walls of nearby mortuary temples, first the Ramesseum and then Medinet Habu, staging what is usually described as history's earliest recorded labour strike, chanting that they were hungry until officials negotiated a partial payment. The episode was not an isolated protest: shortages recurred over the following months, exposing a real breakdown in the state's grain-distribution system for its own workforce.

By Year 16 of Ramesses IX (early 1100s BC), rivalry between Theban officials, Paweraa, mayor of the east bank, and Paser, mayor of the west bank, produced formal accusations that royal and private tombs on the West Bank were being plundered under Paser's watch. The resulting inquiry, recorded in Papyrus Abbott, reported that most royal tombs were found intact, a verdict that discredited Paweraa's accusation at the time. Yet the related trial recorded in Papyrus Leopold II-Amherst (one document, split between the Brussels and New York collections after being cut and sold separately) proved that the 17th-Dynasty tomb of Sobekemsaf II genuinely had been robbed: eight men, including stonemasons, a coppersmith, a farmer and a temple doorkeeper, confessed under interrogation to stripping the royal mummy of its gold.

Papyrus Salt 124, compiled around the reign of Seti II, lists formal accusations against Paneb, chief workman of one side of the Deir el-Medina crew, alleging he bribed the vizier Pra-nakht with household servants to obtain his post (reportedly displacing his own adoptive father and predecessor, Neferhotep), stole stone and equipment intended for the royal tomb, and intimidated workmen who complained. No surviving verdict confirms every charge, and the accuser was a rival scribe, but the dossier shows patronage and bribery could determine even a skilled trade's senior posts.