In William Shakespeare’s 1599 play As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques asserts that ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’ (2.7.139–140). And while Seti was undoubtedly the leading man in his own lifetime, he was no strolling player standing upon a stage alone. Like all supreme monarchs, he was supported firstly by a vast bureaucracy and royal administration, and secondly by the industry of his subjects. So while it may be tempting to look only at the character and the person of the king himself, it is equally important to investigate those men and women, from the most favoured courtiers to the lowliest workmen, who inhabited the king’s milieu and aided his reign. It is from these people, and the administrative documents they often appear in, that we can gain a better understanding of Seti’s policies and his actual management of the country, beyond the idealism of the ostentatious monumental inscriptions in Thebes and Memphis.
Even a supreme monarch requires counsellors and courtiers. Chief among all of pharaoh’s advisers stood the vizier, a term imported into English from the Arabic term wazier, meaning ‘viceroy’. In Egyptology, the term is used to denote pharaoh’s first minister, who carried the Egyptian title Tjati. Rather than employing only a single vizier, the Egyptian king generally had two – a Vizier of the South and Vizier of the North – reflecting both the cultural and geographical division of Egypt into the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt. While letters and administrative documents can provide us with a glimpse of the influence and role of the vizierate during different periods of Egyptian history, a single textual source, known as Duties of the Vizier,¹ provides far more comprehensive and detailed insight. This text is commonly found in tombs and tomb chapels of 18th and 19th Dynasty viziers, pre-eminent among these an almost complete example from the tomb chapel of the Vizier Rekhmire who served Thutmosis III. The text takes the form of a lengthy instruction in the duties, responsibilities and correct behaviour of a vizier and covers a dizzying array of policy areas over which the vizier held autonomy. Chief among these was the establishment of an administrative office or bureau, the ‘Office of the Vizier’, which employed scribes and archivists to aid the minister in his tasks. Initially the text details ceremonial positions which the vizier should take while holding audiences, instructing him to be seated on a stool, wearing a specific type of linen garment, flanked by the two overseers of his office. His scribes should be arrayed, most likely in order of seniority, before him. In an unusual show of egalitarianism, the text also underlines the equal nature of all petitioners to the vizier despite their status in life or the state hierarchy:
‘ One is heard after his equal, but one who is lower is not heard before one who is higher. However, if one of high status says: “No one shall be heard before me!” then he is to be seized by the representative of the Vizier.’²
It is unclear what the punishment for line-cutting was; presumably any presumptuous official was simply removed from the vizier’s presence. The text goes on to describe what might be considered a type of strategy or policy meeting which would ideally take place every morning between the king and the vizier in either Memphis or Thebes, dependent on where the king was in residence. It does not provides details of how these meetings were structured, but once completed, the vizier was to go and meet the treasurer and report on the affairs of state with the words:
‘ All your affairs are whole and secure; every storeroom of the Residence is whole and secure. I have reported the closing and opening of the fortresses by every authority.’³
The treasurer would similarly give a general verbal report on the state of the kingdom, after which it was the duty of the vizier to go and oversee the opening of the gates to the palace so that petitioners and other officials could gain entry. Aside from these daily meetings, the vizier had overall responsibility for such disparate policy areas as agriculture, land boundaries, cattle counts, the state of fortifications, mining expeditions, taxation, various royal construction works, appointment of mayors and governors and – perhaps most importantly – the pursuit of corruption and disloyal behaviour among the officialdom.
With such a wide-ranging portfolio, it is surprising that the king had any duties left to attend to at all. However, the vizier functioned only as the king’s representative, and while he was no doubt an immensely powerful figure, the frequent contact with the king (even though, given the transient nature of the king in ancient Egypt, it seems unlikely that they truly met on a daily basis) suggests that the king could, if he so desired, take a much more hands-on approach to the day-to-day running of his country.
So whom did the young King Seti trust enough to place in such an important administrative position? One might imagine that an ideal vizier should be competent, but not of a character disposition that might see him attempt to wrest power away from the king or indulge in more than the usual levels of corruption and skulduggery, which might be expected in any such hierarchy. Seti arguably had a far more detailed understanding of the role of the vizier than many kings, as he himself had served as a vizier to his father, Ramesses I, before his death.
In reality, it seems that Seti did not immediately choose a vizier, but rather maintained a man by the name of Nebamun in this position as Vizier of the North. Nebamun⁴ had first served Horemheb and must have been of fairly advanced age by the time Seti became king. He is not well-attested, and his tomb still remains to be discovered. His age may have been viewed as a benefit by Seti: as an untried ruler, an old cunning administrator with lengthy experience of the state hierarchy could be a valuable asset, in particular if his loyalty to Seti was assured – and it seems very unlikely that Nebamun would have maintained his position if it was not.
But while we do not know much about Nebamun, the Vizier of the North, the Vizier of the South is far better attested. When Seti was crowned, he promoted a young official by the name of Paser,⁵ the son of the High Priest of Amun, to companion in the palace and Chief Chamberlain. Both positions held great prestige as they guaranteed a level of access to the king which was not afforded to many. No doubt impressed by the young man, Seti eventually promoted him to Vizier of the South and governor of the city of Thebes. It seems that Seti made the right choice. Paser proved to be a prolific vizier, known from many statues, graffiti and administrative documents⁶ not only from the reign of Seti himself, but well into the reign of his son, Ramesses II. Paser seems in particular to have lavished attention on the construction of royal monuments, an important responsibility given Seti’s extensive building programme. In the biography carved into his beautifully decorated tomb in Thebes, Paser even records one of his inspection tours of the royal workshops at Karnak and the – somewhat sycophantic – compliments paid to the vizier by the officials overseeing the work:
‘ You are the eyes of the King of Upper Egypt and the ears of the King of Lower [Egypt] […] You know of every decree and your teaching circulates in the workshop.’⁷
With Paser and his colleague in the north effectively in control of the dayto-day administration of the country, Seti’s ‘civil service’ was in safe hands.
From a series of administrative texts known as the Palace Accounts,⁸ which originate from Seti’s palace in Memphis, we can as modern observers catch a glimpse of the bureaucratic bustle that followed Seti’s rise to the throne and the first few years of the energetic young king’s reign. Most of these accounts are dry even by the standards of a state bureaucracy. They detail the precise weight of flour arriving every day from the royal granaries to the palace bakeries, which were managed by Neferhotep, the Mayor of Memphis, and the weight of the finished bread. Meticulously, the scribe has then calculated the wastage of grain during the milling and baking processes. The accounts even list the names of individual bakers on duty and the division of bread sent to different parts of the royal court. The accounts are not only invaluable documents when studying subsistence, production and supply chains in early Ramesside society; they can also help us to partially reconstruct Seti’s movements during his first few years in power, as the baking accounts in particular often mention the king’s location in the country at a given time.
During Year 2 of Seti’s reign, the accounts note the king’s comings and goings between July and November. In early July, Seti stayed at the Palace of Thutmosis I in Memphis. A week later, he left Memphis, heading to the Delta, either to the city of Pi-Ramesses or alternatively to oversee preparations for further military campaigns into Canaan along Egypt’s eastern frontier. He remained in the north for less than two weeks before travelling back to Memphis and from there to Thebes, possibly to oversee the initial stages of the construction of his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The accounts suggest that he remained in Thebes for several weeks, possibly as long as a month, before travelling back north to the Delta for the end of the year. Considering that he had spent the early year locked in conflict in the Levant and establishing offerings for temples in Memphis and Thebes, the accounts contribute to an image of a highly itinerant and active king, travelling throughout his kingdom to secure his powerbase and personally oversee the new national foundations he was attempting to create after the chaotic post-Amarna interlude.
Aside from the extensive baking records, the Palace Accounts also include details of what appears to be a city-wide census of timber.⁹ Contemporarily with his travels around Egypt in his second regnal year, Seti despatched envoys to the estates of officials throughout the Egyptian capital to create lists of, and probably requisition, large quantities of lumber. Given the rarity of good straight baulks of wood in Egypt, and the value of the cedar tree from Lebanon, such a requisition makes good financial sense. Most of the timber listed in the Accounts was already worked, and most seem to be ship components. We learn for instance that the Royal Scribe Ruru had in his possession one wooden mast of 11m in length made from the coniferous Lebanon pine. Ruia, a soldier who served on-board the warship Djoserkare is a Star, evidently owned another beam made from Lebanese timber, though this one is only 4.5m long. Additional components such as stern posts, ribs and planking owned by standard-bearers, gardeners, charioteers, royal estates and temples throughout Memphis give the impression that an entire disassembled fleet lay ready in the capital for the king to command. This curious hoarding of timber does not appear to have been confined to the occupants of Memphis: a contemporary will¹⁰ from the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina specifically states that the workman Pashedu had in his possession two timber mooring posts which he ordered bequeathed to his son, Hehnekhu, upon his own death.
The timber count conducted in Memphis was a large-scale undertaking, and one naturally wonders why the young king felt the need to know the precise amounts of timber in his capital. The reason most likely lies in the type of timber counted and requisitioned: timber of a type and quality of use to shipwrights constructing larger vessels capable of sailing the Mediterranean. The primary objectives of Seti’s first campaign in the Levant during his first few years in office were to reassert Egyptian control over Lebanon and – crucially – secure continued access to the valuable Lebanese cedar forests. Could it be that Seti was gathering what resources he had on hand to build a fleet capable of sailing to Byblos and claim even more timber? It seems likely, particularly in light of Seti’s ambitious construction programme. Tall, straight and dense baulks of timber were not merely required by the shipwrights, but also by builders, quarrymen and sculptors. They were used as levers when breaking out basalts and granite from the rock-face, to build scaffolding for those who carved intricate temple reliefs and as roofing beams and flagpoles for the finished temples. Whether destined for the shipyard or the building site, the young king needed timber. And his subjects were compelled to comply.
With his capital and major cities in the hands of his officials and their representatives, Seti was free to travel through his kingdom. His reach was not only concentrated in the cities: a great deal of royal power was held in the provinces in the form of various royal estates and palaces, and it is likely that Seti occasionally visited these, even though they too were under the day-to-day management of lower-ranking officials. An ancient Egyptian king could donate land to various temple institutions, and along with the land came farming communities to work it. They then transferred some of their harvest in the form of taxes to the temple hierarchy, who could use this excess for trade or for consumption. But the king, or perhaps the state and the crown, also owned vast amounts of land in a similar system. These royal estates, called Per-Nesut (literally ‘king’s house’), were commonly named after specific rulers – presumably those who founded them: Seti’s father, Ramesses I, had founded at least one estate, or at least renamed an older one as ‘The Estate of Ramesses I’.¹¹ Some royal estates specialized in the production of specific materials or substances. The tomb of Tutankhamun, for instance, contained several wine amphora with the labels ‘Year 5, Wine of the Estate of Tutankhamun, Ruler of Thebes, in the Western River, chief vintner Khaa’ and ‘Year 9, Wine of the Estate of Aten in the Western River, chief vintner Sennufe’.¹²
Other estates, most likely those in the fertile Nile Delta, held herds of cattle. From the New Kingdom biography of Kenamun,¹³ a steward of Amenhotep II, we learn that officials occasionally took a census of this cattle, copies of which were despatched to the capital so that scribes could compile a complete list of the king’s domain. The rearing of cattle on royal estates dates back as far as the Old Kingdom, and one of the primary reasons was to create a staple and high-protein food source for the men working on royal building projects. Zooarchaeological evidence from the Giza workmen’s village, which housed the men who built the Great Pyramid of Khufu, has demonstrated that they subsisted on a diet high in beef, most likely from cattle reared at a royal estate in or near the Delta site of Kom el-Hisn.¹⁴
While officials, such as stewards and high stewards of the king, managed these estates, who conducted the actual work involved in their production? One likely source of workmen was the army. Granting soldiers plots of land where they could work in peacetime and even settle with their families was used widely during the latter part of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070–712 BCE), as evidenced by land registers such as the Papyrus Wilbour¹⁵ and Papyrus Reinhardt.¹⁶ Other workers were prisoners-of-war, forcibly settled on royal or temple estates after being defeated and captured in battle. Ramesses III in particular settled huge population groups of Libyan captives in the eastern Delta after his defeat of a vast Libyan invasion. With time, this proved to be a misjudged policy, as the large and culturally separate units of Libyans banded together and formed a powerful political faction which eventually seized power in Lower Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period.
Few archaeological remains now survive to bear witness to the daily life of the many villages and settlements which clustered along the fertile riverbank and in the Delta marshes during Seti’s reign, and whose inhabitants worked on the royal estates. It is also uncertain how many of these Seti visited during his reign, but from the Palace Accounts we can clearly see that the king spent a great deal of his time in Thebes and in the eastern Nile Delta. In both these places there are well-preserved settlements which can inform about the daily life and daily grind in Seti’s Egypt: Deir el-Medina in Thebes and Pi-Ramesses in the Nile Delta.
The history of settlement at Deir el-Medina is intrinsically linked to a change in the royal burial practices between the Middle and New Kingdoms. Possibly the most notable Egyptian monument is the Great Pyramid of Khufu, dating to the Old Kingdom. This pyramid is the grandest of a large quantity of pyramids built from the 3rd Dynasty onwards at Giza, Dahshur, Hawara, Lisht and el-Lahun. While the great Giza pyramids were built from limestone, later examples from the Middle Kingdom were built from mud-brick and many have survived only as barely recognizable heaps of degraded silt. Their associated mortuary temples and the settlements which staffed them have fared somewhat better; most famously the 12th Dynasty settlement of el-Lahun in the Fayum region of Egypt, which housed the workmen and priests associated with the mortuary cult of Senwosret II, whose pyramid and mortuary temple lay nearby. Far more humble royal burials were predominant during the turbulent years of the Second Intermediate Period, with the royal burials at Abydos amounting to little more than a few subterranean limestone chambers with painted relief and texts.
By the early New Kingdom, and the shift in royal power from Memphis to Thebes, the burial of royals in the north came to an end. Instead, the early New Kingdom royals sought inspiration for their own tombs in the burial places of their ancestors: rock-cut tombs in difficult-to-reach valleys on the West Bank. Amenhotep I was the first king to be buried in a location whose very name evokes the grandeur of ancient Egypt: the Valley of the Kings. He hired an architect named Ineni and charged him with supervising the construction of a royal tomb with a separated mortuary temple whose location could not draw the attention of tomb robbers. In his biography, Ineni describes the construction process of Amenhotep I’s tomb:
‘ I witnessed the excavation of the tomb of his Majesty in solitude, no one saw and no one heard […] My mind was vigilant as I sought to be useful. I created fields of clay to hide their tombs in the necropolis. Works like these had not been done before.’¹⁷
Ineni evidently did his job well. The tomb of Amenhotep I has still to be identified with certainty by archaeologists, although some believe it to be KV 39,¹⁸ an empty and poorly preserved burial site in the Valley of the Kings. The mummy of the king himself was moved in antiquity and found – together with Seti I and many other royals – in a cache of mummies at Deir el-Bahri.
By Seti’s reign, the tradition of burying the deceased pharaoh in sumptuously decorated rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been firmly established. However, the constant construction of royal tombs meant that a full-time crew of skilled workmen had to be at hand. The early rulers of the 18th Dynasty had solved this problem of manpower by founding the settlement of Deir el-Medina, the workmen’s village, close to the Valley of the Kings on the Theban West Bank.
Deir el-Medina¹⁹ was founded during the reign of Thutmosis I, at least according to the archaeological material found at the site. Several mud-bricks in the earliest levels of the low wall which enclosed the village bear this pharaoh’s cartouche, providing an excellent terminus post quem for his reign. The villagers themselves had a different notion, however, worshipping a deified Amenhotep I as the founder of their village, possibly because he was the first ruler to be buried in the Valley of the Kings, their workplace. The village was a fluid construct, expanding and contracting based on the number of inhabitants. At its height, it contained some eighty houses, and in theory eighty nuclear families consisting of a workman, his wife, children and additional relatives. The total number of inhabitants during this period may have ranged to as many as 500 within the village itself.
The houses²⁰ were built from sun-dried mud-brick and many followed a similar design. From the street, a visitor or occupant would take a few steps down into an entrance hall. Most of these contained an enigmatic structure known to archaeologists as a lit clos, a raised mud-brick platform whose function may have been as furniture – such as a bench or bed – or it may have been a household altar. A door led from the entrance hall into the dwelling’s main hall, where wooden tables and chairs were found, along with religious equipment such as ancestor busts or statuettes. In some houses, a staircase led from the main room to a storage cellar. Others had separate bedrooms, although it is likely that occupants mostly slept on reed mats on the floor of the main hall. At the back of the house was a small kitchen with a hearth and bread-oven, only partially roofed to allow the smoke to escape. Additional living space may have been afforded by using the roof for cooking and sleeping. Livestock, such as sheep, may even have been kept in the open air on the roof.
Working as they did on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the workmen could not be expected to farm and provide for their families in the customary manner. Aside from the lack of manpower, Deir el-Medina was located far from the fertile strip of soil along the Nile banks, in a rocky valley where farming was not possible. Instead, the inhabitants were provided with the necessary victuals by the state. Fortunately, written evidence of the bureaucracy involved in the daily provisioning of the workmen has to a great extent been preserved. Lists and records were kept on ostraca, flakes of limestone or pottery, which are far more durable than papyrus. Many of these were found in rubbish dumps by archaeologists working in or exploring the settlement. These ostraca, along also with fragments of papyrus, provide an enviable overview of the organization of the village. From these texts we know that the villagers were catered for by groups of associated workers, a type of support staff, who ranged from potters to fishermen, coppersmiths, wood-cutters and basket-makers.
A group of ostraca²¹ dated to the second, third and fourth years of Seti’s reign preserve some of the deliveries of goods to the village. Firewood, pottery of various types, bundles of vegetables, bread loaves and even animal dung for fuel was brought every tenth day in vast quantities to the community. Other documents record the delivery of vegetables, herbs, bread and beer. Further texts describe the delivery of rations in the form of sacks of grain, distributed according to the placement of a worker within the internal hierarchy: the chief workmen getting the lion’s share of two sacks of emmer wheat and five-and-a-half of barley, a much lowlier maidservant getting only one-and-a-half sacks of each.²² More rarely, on occasions of religious festivals for instance, the workers received luxury food and items directly from the king, foodstuffs such as honey, oils and cream and fine cloth.²³
The vizier was – at least in theory – directly responsible for the village. Indeed, Seti’s vizier, Paser, is well-evidenced at the site, and it seems he took a personal interest in the reorganization of the village and the work of its inhabitants.²⁴ Under the vizier were the two foremen who controlled the work gangs, one for the ‘left’ gang and one for the ‘right’. These terms mirror the Egyptian terms for a ship’s crew, which was divided into who rowed on the port and starboard side of a vessel. Another leading figure in the village was the Scribe of the Tomb, who was concerned with administration and record-keeping. Each foreman occasionally had a deputy foreman, usually their oldest son, who would follow in their footsteps when they died. The various skilled workmen, the stone-cutters, plasterers and painters came next in the hierarchy, followed by the outside personnel and the Medjay police who guarded both the village and the royal tombs.
While the men worked on the royal tomb, the women of the village produced the staples of the ancient Egyptian cuisine: beer brewed from barley, and wheat or barley bread. The brewing of beer seems to have been a popular activity, in particular for festivals, and work rotas kept by the scribe occasionally mention workmen who were allowed to stay home from work in order to help with the brewing of beer for a particular occasion, either a religious festival or even a private celebration.²⁵
The payment of rations to the workers was an integral part of their survival. Any delays in payments naturally caused conflict. Possibly the earliest reference to an organized labour strike comes from Deir el-Medina. During the reign of Ramesses III, external factors – namely the wholesale collapse of the trade circuit in the eastern Mediterranean – and accompanying internal economic issues in Egypt caused long delays in the delivery of wheat to the village. As one of the major food staples, the workers and their families were naturally alarmed. According to the Turin Strike Papyrus, an account of the strike written by the scribe Amennakhte, on the eighteenth straight day without rations, the workers threw down their tools, left the village and went to the Temple of Thutmosis III, conducting a sit-down strike behind the temple. Quarrelling ensued with various officials who, to no avail, offered whatever slim rations they could gather. Angrily, the workmen told the officials:
‘ The prospect of hunger and thirst has driven us to this: there is no clothing, there is no […], there is no fish, there are no vegetables. Send to Pharaoh, our good lord, about it, and send to the vizier, our superior, that we may be supplied with provisions.’²⁶
The situation deteriorated further, to the point where the villagers began occupying the royal tomb, one of them even swearing – presumably in a fit of frustration – that if proper rations were not forthcoming, he would make plans to rob one of the royal tombs and simply buy his own food and supplies with the loot. The uneasy conditions continued; whenever rations were delayed, the workers would leave their village and blockade a temple on the West bank, even shouting at the Mayor of Thebes as he passed them. The mayor was so alarmed by the mob that he sent his gardener as an envoy to the striking workers, promising to give them fifty sacks of emmer wheat from the city’s granaries until the king and the vizier could re-establish the village’s supply chain.
When not striking, the workers would leave the village itself and walk up a tortuous path through the Theban hills to a small settlement they had constructed – consisting of little more than dry-stone huts and wind-shelters – on the path leading down into the Valley of the Kings itself. Many ostraca found in the village and in the valley preserve what amounts to work rotas or day books. On these chips of limestone, the Scribe of the Tomb took the register during the day, noting who was at work and who was absent – and in some cases providing a reason for their absence. Reasons could include illness; we know from an ostraca in the British Museum²⁷ dated to the fortieth regnal year of Ramesses II that a workman named Huynefer had a bout of illness and some type of eye infection, missing several days of work, while another, Simut, missed a day’s work because of his wife’s menstruation. A particularly unfortunate worker, Seba, was stung by a scorpion and – understandably – is listed as absent for several days afterwards.
Other reasons, such as brewing beer and performing religious offerings and libations, are also given. Among the most poignant is the perfunctory mention of Rahotep, who missed four days of work because he was wrapping the corpse of his son to prepare it for burial, and Amenemwia, who had to perform the same duty for his deceased mother. The level of detail which the written documentation has provided regarding the occupants of the village imbues them with a degree of familiarity. It is possible to trace entire families as they developed, as children were born and died, as marriage celebrations were held and offering feasts conducted.
Not all the documents found at Deir el-Medina are administrative. In 1927, a great library of literary texts written on papyrus was found near a private chapel. The collection of literary texts belonged to the scribe Qenher-khepesh-ef and his family, and includes a great number of Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom stories and moral treatises, such as the Satire of the Trades, a Middle Kingdom composition wherein a father describes the horrors of every manual profession in order to scare his son into becoming a scribe. It also includes the Maxims of Any, a New Kingdom text which comprises lessons for proper conduct. The library also includes magical and religious texts, as well as private letters and wills. Aside from these drier documents, the library also contained love songs, popular during the New Kingdom and filled with flowery sentiments, and plentiful use of metaphors and similes.
Aside from making food, working in the valley, celebrating and – in some cases – reading or perhaps being told stories and tales, the workmen and their families also engaged in a complex economic machinery. This was based on barter trade, as the concept of currency was unknown in Egypt at the time. One ostraca records the price of an ox: two jars of fat, five flax-linen tunics, one kilt and one hide.²⁸ As skilled workmen, the inhabitants of the village also produced funerary equipment for the non-royal elite of Thebes. One of the carpenters for instance produced chairs, a bed, a coffin and a wooden statue for an official named Amennakhte.²⁹ Another carpenter was paid with grain, vegetables, fowl and a basket among other items for a wooden image of the god Seth.³⁰
Occasionally these transactions between villagers could spark hostility, and some arguments might be brought before the village council, known as the qenbet, who would arbitrate. Many of these trials were summarized on ostraca or papyrus and can help us understand how justice was meted out within the tight-knit community. When the rulings of the qenbet was not enough and more divine authority needed, the villagers could ask the oracle for aid. The oracle was the statue of the deified Amenhotep I, the founder of the village. During religious festivals, the effigy would be carried around the village on the shoulders of eight priests. If questions were posed to the statue, it would answer by moving backwards for ‘no’ and forwards for ‘yes’. Considering that the priests who carried the icon were temporarily recruited from among the local villagers, it is perhaps likely that answers were pre-agreed between the questioner and the priests, possibly even in exchange for some remuneration.
The villagers not only lived their lives in the proximity of the village, they were also buried nearby. Two large necropolises on the eastern and western side of the village have survived, with tombs in varying degrees of preservation from the 18th–20th dynasties. Among the most notable is TT1, the Tomb of Sennedjem,³¹ which serves as a particularly dazzling example of an early Ramesside tomb at the site. Sennedjem was a simple workman in the community, most likely a mason, but his familial connections with the local cult of the goddess Hathor may have given him some primacy in the community, evidenced by the stunning array of high-quality funerary objects found in his tomb. He was a contemporary of Seti, but outlived the king, dying in the eleventh regnal year of Ramesses II. The tomb prepared for him also became the final resting place for most of his family; twenty bodies were found when the tomb was discovered in 1886 by the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero.
Sennedjem spent his life as a workman at Deir el-Medina – his title being the common ‘Servant in the Place of Truth’ bestowed upon all the artisans working in the village. His profession was most likely that of a mason, a common vocation, and in the light of this commonality his tomb appears incongruous. He was not a scribe of the village, nor a foreman or particularly highly placed in the internal hierarchical structure of the society. Nevertheless, the decorations in his tomb, and the funerary equipment with which he was buried, are of a quality unparalleled except in the finest of noble and royal burials. The vaulted burial chamber is decorated with scenes showing Sennedjem and his wife, Iyneferti, harvesting wheat and flax in the fields of the afterlife. There is scripture from the Books of the Dead, and depictions of Sennedjem’s extended family and the tomb-owner being led, hand in hand with Anubis, to the central figure of Osiris, the God of the Netherworld. In another panel, Anubis stands vigil over the mummified remains as it lies on a bed, with legs carved in the shape of a lion’s paws. All the scenes are painted in vivid colours, with strong yellows and reds predominating. Among the funerary equipment found by Maspero and his colleagues in the tomb – and now held in museum collections across Egypt, Europe and North America³² – are blue-painted wine jars, a finely crafted and decorated cosmetic box and many exquisitely carved, painted and varnished anthropoid coffins, two of the finest – belonging to Sennedjem’s son, Khonsu – currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.³³
Considering the Egyptian proclivity for building in stone, the job of mason must have been relatively common. Yet Sennedjem’s burial assemblage seems almost excessively rich for a manual labourer. So what differentiated a mason at Deir el-Medina from a mason in Memphis? The obvious answer is twofold: resources and talent. Being a state-sponsored community, the villagers of Deir el-Medina were well-paid for their services and – in conjunction with their external work for the nobles of Thebes –were relatively wealthy individuals, controlling quantities and types of materials (such as luxury goods given on special occasions as gifts from the king) to which ordinary Egyptians had no access. Secondly, the artists and artisans at Deir el-Medina were also free to use their talent in painting and sculpting for the benefit of themselves, their families and friends. One ostracon³⁴ records how one workman paid his friend, who worked as a draughtsman in the village, some baskets, vegetables and sandals in exchange for decorating the burial chamber of his tomb. A few household goods in exchange for the services of an artist talented enough to work on the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings was surely a bargain in anyone’s money.
More nefarious methods were also allegedly used by certain villagers to ensure the wealth and splendour of their eternal homes. Papyrus Salt 124³⁵ contains a series of allegations against one of the foremen at Deir el-Medina during the later part of the Ramesside Period. The accuser, a workman and son of a former foreman by the name of Amennakht, writes to the vizier accusing the foreman Paneb, the adopted son of Amenakht’s brother, Neferhotep, of a series of misdeeds. Some of these are moral; Amennakht accuses Paneb of conducting multiple affairs with married women in the village, including a mother and daughter, and also violent sexual assault. Other accusations relate to Paneb’s corruption and misappropriation of labour and resources. According to Amennakht, Paneb stole stone from the royal tomb and ordered his men to fashion it into columns for his own personal burial chamber. He also allegedly stole various valuable commodities such as animal mummies from royal burials and even from the burial assemblages of his colleagues. It is difficult to be certain if Amennakht’s accusations are entirely believable.³⁶ As a brother and son of two former foremen, Amennakht most likely expected the role of foreman to pass to him. However, he was ignored in favour of his brother Neferthotep’s adopted son, Paneb. As such, Amennakht had much to gain from Paneb’s downfall and every incentive to cast the new foreman in a villainous light.
Seti’s interest in the village and the community at Deir el-Medina amounted to more than the occasional visit by his deputy, Paser. He also lavished more direct attention on the community by constructing a temple dedicated to Hathor at the site.³⁷ In addition to this new structure, the villagers’ religious needs were catered to by the Temple of Amenhotep I, dedicated to the deified ‘founder’ of the village, as well as a series of private chapels. The temples formed an integral part of the religious and daily life, the chapels functioning sometimes as meeting places where affairs of the community could be discussed, and the workmen themselves serving as priests, on a rota basis, in the temples at the site. Religious processions and festivals were also an integral part of village life. The Temple of Hathor built by Seti for the inhabitants is modest by the scale of his grander works at Abydos, Luxor and Heliopolis, though it was still larger than the Temple of Amenhotep I which stood beside it. Today, little remains of this structure save for column bases and low walls. Later alterations by Ptolemaic rulers have also helped to obscure its original dimensions and scope.
The community at Deir el-Medina remains a fascinating source of study. The many written accounts, the well-preserved archaeology and, of course, the fruits of the villagers’ labour at the royal tombs all combine to create a vision of a highly specialized community whose role in ancient Egyptian society and the cult of kingship was unparalleled. However, Deir el-Medina was hardly a typical example of an ancient Egyptian village or town, and its inhabitants not really representative of Seti’s subjects as a whole. While Deir el-Medina and its citizens are a crucial thread in the tapestry of Seti’s Egypt, another community – far larger – provides evidence for some of the different classes upon which Seti’s throne rested.
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Driving east from the sprawl and organized chaos of downtown Cairo along the Ismailia Desert Road, one is struck by the hostility of the landscape. Infrequent clusters of houses, white mosques with domed roofs glistening in the sun and clusters of palms and tamarisk shrubs are interspersed with broad swathes of featureless desert. Occasional villages along the road offer plastic bags of ful or hawawshy, a bread filled with minced lamb and onions, to the passing traveller. However, the quiet of the desert is immediately broken when one enters the labyrinthine roads of the eastern Nile Delta. Here, the landscape is green and fertile, the desert replaced by fields of wheat and rice, villages scattered throughout the landscape, standing atop the tells – turtleback mounds of degraded mud-brick and silt – where once Pharaonic, Greek and Roman communities lived. The Nile Delta is Egypt’s bread basket, and has been since the early days of Pharaonic civilization, benefitting from the fertile silt that has been deposited by the river in the area for millennia.
Among the interchangeable hamlets lies the village of Qantir. Entering it by a bridge across a broad canal, there is little in its dirt roads and concrete houses that suggests any particular historical significance. Walking along the narrow irrigation trenches into the fields, a perceptive visitor will, however, note the thousands of pottery sherds which litter the ground, along with fragments of limestone and even the occasional pieces of faience. A pair of limestone feet stand lonely sentinel in one of these fields, one of the only aboveground signs that upon this soil once stood the capital of Pharaonic Egypt, one of the largest cities in the world at its time: Pi-Ramesses.
The story of the modern discovery of Pi-Ramesses begins in early 1884 with the eminent archaeologist, Flinders Petrie, and an outstanding case of mistaken identity. In a letter sent to his mother in England, Petrie describes his arduous journey by boat from the town of Faqus to San el-Hagar, an archaeological site which lies some 15km north of Qantir:
‘ The boatman had professedly been cleaning the boat; and perhaps it was as clean as a fish boat could be, well-scrubbed and cleared out; but of course the smell was irremovable.’³⁸
Petrie soon set up camp and began his work from the morning of 6 February, the weather proving a serious obstacle to him, his tent being continuously blown down in storms and deluges of rain.³⁹ The sheer quantity of Ramesside sculpture found at the site led Petrie to the belief that he had identified the almost legendary capital of the Ramessides, Pi-Ramesses, which also has a passing mention in the Bible. However, Petrie was unable to find actual occupation layers dating to the Ramesside Period, and it was not until eighty years later that Egyptologists explained this curious absence.
Petrie had in fact been digging the Late Period capital of Tanis, which was built as Pi-Ramesses was abandoned due to the silting up of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile which had fed the capital of the Ramessides. The occupants moved enormous amounts of granite and limestone sculpture, structural components, stela and obelisks dated to the reigns of Seti I, Ramesses II and Merenptah, using it to construct their new capital further north. In this way, they effectively tricked Petrie into thinking he had identified a 19th and 20th Dynasty capital, when he had in fact been excavating a capital dated to the 21st Dynasty and later. Preliminary work by the Egyptian archaeologists Labib Habachi⁴⁰ and Mahmud Hamza⁴¹ led other Egyptologists⁴² to correctly surmise that the actual location of Pi-Ramesses was not at San el-Hagar, but instead, underneath the fields surrounding the modern village of Qantir, only 8km north of the old Hyksos capital, Avaris, at Tell el-Dab’a. The work by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities was followed in the 1980s by an Egypto-German mission led by Edgar Pusch and later Henning Franzmeier which continues to the present day.
After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the early 18th Dynasty rulers took over their capital at Avaris, building palaces and expanding the infrastructure. This ended during the 18th Dynasty after the centre of the settlement moved towards modern-day Qantir. The settlement which would later become Pi-Ramesses appears to have been founded during the reign of Horemheb, although its scope it still unknown. Some building work may also have been conducted during the reign of Ramesses I, who hailed from the eastern Delta and would have been familiar with the area. So by the time Seti ascended to the throne, Pi-Ramesses was little more than a provincial backwater. Seti would spend a great deal of resources expanding it and turning it into an urban centre. The reasons for the expansion are clear. Firstly, Seti’s familial connections most likely led him to hold the area in special regard, and secondly, given the young king’s prodigious foreign policy, settling at Pi-Ramesses brought him closer to the border fortresses along the edge of the Delta where his armies were equipped and mustered.
Illegal excavations in the area during the early twentieth century allowed European and American scholars to amass vast collections of faience tiles from the site. One such collection, held in the Louvre Museum in Paris,⁴³ contains several faience inlays decorated with the cartouches of Seti I. Reconstructions have shown that these tiles most likely belonged to an imposing doorway. These tiles remain the only tangible evidence for a vast palace which Seti constructed at the site during his reign as he worked to transform the settlement into a royal residence. Other tiles from Seti’s palace and the later buildings of Ramesses II were purchased by the American scholar William C. Hayes⁴⁴ from antiquities dealers in Cairo and gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the archaeological work conducted by Mahmud Hamza⁴⁵ in 1928 at the site, excavators found thousands of ceramic moulds, dyeing material, faience tiles and blocks of calcite-alabaster cut into geometric shapes, ready to be placed as inlays in the faience tiles. On the basis of these discoveries, Hamza proposed that this was the area in which the plentiful faience tiles from the reigns of Seti I and Ramesses II were produced.
The most convincing evidence for Seti’s expansion of the site into a fully-fledged production centre was uncovered by German archaeologists in an area designated QI. In the lower strata they identified evidence of large-scale metal working⁴⁶ in the form of melting channels and cross-shaped furnaces. Ceramic blasting pipes connected to foot-bellows channelled air continuously into the furnaces, allowing them to reach significant temperatures. The products of these melting shops are clear from the sheer amount of weaponry found at the site: arrow-heads of various types, spear-heads, daggers and axes were all found at the site – some even inscribed with the titular of Seti himself, weapons which most likely belonged to his private bodyguard. South of this armoury were other workshops dedicated to the production of goods in leather, wood and flint.⁴⁷ Here too, weapons predominate in the form of flint arrow-heads and lances. Together with the foundry, these workshops functioned as factories, mass-producing the weapons used to equip Seti’s armies.
No Egyptian army would be complete without its charioteers, however. At some point during the reign of Seti, the foundry was shut down and its production most likely moved. Instead, a massive administrative building was constructed in its place. Hundreds of chariot components, such as horse-bits and wheel-hubs,⁴⁸ were found in this building, which must have been a chariot hall, a gathering or storage place for some of Seti’s chariot regiments. Later, during the reign of his son, Ramesses II, the king augmented this chariot hall with a vast stable complex in an area designated QIV by modern excavators,⁴⁹ and by the reign of Seti’s grandson, Merenptah, textual sources speak of Pi-Ramesses as the primary marshalling place of the Pharaonic chariot corps.⁵⁰
With Seti’s intervention, Pi-Ramesses developed from a simple settlement, to a royal residence and finally to a fully-formed metropolis. The frequent references in the Baking Accounts to the young king being away from Memphis on trips to the Nile Delta during the early days of his reign are undoubtedly related to his building work and expansions at Qantir.
Excursus: Seti’s People
As is so often the case when history is written, it is the grand people who are remembered by the ages and future generations. We know much about Seti himself. We know something about his administration, courtiers and family. We know a little about the men who built his tomb, but we know almost nothing about the men who toiled in the foundries in Pi-Ramesses, fashioning the equipment which would allow the king and his armies to triumph across the Near East. By lucky chance, we may know the names of some of these lowest-ranked of individuals who lived in Seti’s Egypt – the Palace Accounts after all preserve some tantalizing glimpses of the everyday humdrum of the royal residence and the people who populated it.
We learn that a man by the name of Huy worked as a sailor and delivered fowl to the palace kitchens during the summer of Seti’s third year. We know that on a specific day during the first year of Seti’s reign, a baker in the palace named Djadja produced 214 loaves of bread. We learn that a woman named Henut-Wedjebut was a slave or servant belonging to a charioteer by the name of Mery, and that she was given a shawl from a consignment of clothing brought to the palace. From rosters also included in these accounts, we learn the names of several Nubian prisoners-of-war, such as Khaemwaset – no doubt an Egyptian name given to him by his captors – who belonged to a Chief Scribe named Nebmehyt.⁵¹ But these dry accounts cannot help us to understand the personalities of these individuals; even less their ambitions or their concerns. From archaeological evidence, we can at best conclude how they spent their lives, how they worked, farmed, cut timber or baked bread.
But this great silent majority must always be borne in mind when history is written; it was after all on their labour and their lives that Seti and his administration rested.