What do you think of this fact?
Strikes feel like a modern thing: unions, picket lines, protest signs. But one of the oldest known strikes happened in ancient Egypt, and the workers involved weren’t building just anything. They were building the pharaoh’s tombs.
No grain, no work
The workers lived with their families in Deir el-Medina, a village near the Valley of the Kings in West Thebes. Their job was to dig and decorate the royal tombs, and a big part of their pay came as grain rations.
In the 29th year of Ramesses III’s reign, in the 12th century BC, those rations didn’t arrive. According to Egypt Museum, the workers waited 18 days past their payday and then decided they were done waiting. They stopped work and gathered behind the funerary temple of Thutmose III. As they passed the control post, they shouted: ‘We are hungry!’
Officials tried to talk them back to work. It didn’t work. The protest lasted several days and moved on to the temple of Ramesses II. Eventually the grain they were owed was paid, but a few days later the crew walked out again. This time they told the authorities they wanted to take their complaints straight to the pharaoh. ‘We are here because of the hunger and thirst,’ they said.
A strike with paperwork
We know all this because a scribe named Amennakht wrote it down. His report, now called the Strike Papyrus, sits in the Museo Egizio in Turin, which describes it as the first documented labour strike in history.
The papyrus even names names. According to Papyrus Stories, two workmen called Kenena and Hay flatly refused to return: ‘We will not return, tell your superiors!’ And the problem wasn’t really solved. When grain did come, the vizier at one point sent only half, because the granaries were nearly empty.
Bonus fact: The walkouts didn’t stop with Ramesses III. According to Papyrus Stories, work stoppages kept happening for the rest of the 20th Dynasty and became more frequent under Ramesses IX to XI.
The pyramids get all the attention, but the workers who built royal tombs also left behind something rarer: proof that they knew their worth.