Before we begin, a very quick note. This episode is about the village of Dia el-Madina

in the age of Setti I'll also be doing a live stream about the village this coming weekend

in order to describe some of the art, tombs and visual records, which are hard to explain in a podcast.

If you're interested in the village of the tomb builders, check this episode's description for details on how you can watch it.

Thank you.

Welcome back to the History of Egypt podcast, episode 198, Servants in the Place of Truth, also known as

The Golden Age of Deer El Medina, Part 1. It's been a while since we visited the village of

the Tomb Builders, located on the west bank of the Nile, in the modern city of Luxor, ancient Wasset or Thebes,

Deer El Medina is the home of the artisans who constructed the tombs in the valley of the kings,

the valley of the queens, and the noble cemeteries in the region.

Dear El Medina is a special place. If you have ever read a book about daily life in

ancient Egypt, or watched a documentary, played a game, or read an article about life in the

land of the pharaohs, chances are a significant chunk of the information in that work came from

studies of Dear El Medina.

The preservation of this village is extraordinary, both in the quantity of material available

and in the details it provides about relationships, families, households, business, trade, agreements,

disputes, and all sorts of daily affairs. For more than a hundred years,

Deer Al-Medina has been one of the pre-eminent sources for understanding ancient Egyptian society.

Today, I want to introduce the village as it appeared around 1300 BCE. The start of its golden era, in which the records and evidence

proliferate on a scale not seen in previous centuries, an error in which we can learn

so much about the ordinary men and women living in the Nile Valley. Well, I say ordinary, but dear El Medina really is a special place.

The workers employed here were high ranking within their society. They were paid directly by the

...