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Deir el-Medina Ostraca

The 91 ostraca found at Deir el-Medina provide a deeply compelling view into the inner workings of the New Kingdom. These ostraca have shown medical, and documentary records, some of which provide information on how water was provided, and how economic transactions were carried out. The extreme variety of information on ostraca found solves many unanswered questions about both matters of daily life and things that Egyptians thought intuitive but are all but unknown to historians now.

Like other Egyptian communities, the workmen and inhabitants of Deir el-Medina received care through a combination of medical treatment, prayer, and magic. Nevertheless, the records at Deir el-Medina indicate some level of division, as records from the village note both a “physician” who saw patients and prescribed treatments, and a “scorpion charmer” who specialized in magical cures for scorpion stings.

The ostraca from Deir el-Medina also differed in their circulation. Magical spells and remedies were widely distributed among the workmen; there are even several cases of spells being sent from one worker to another, with no “trained” intermediary.^{[broken footnote]} Written medical texts appear to have been much rarer, with only a handful of ostraca containing prescriptions, indicating that the trained physician mixed the more complicated remedies himself. There are also several documents that show the writer sending for medical ingredients, but it is unknown whether these were sent according to a physician's prescription, or to fulfill a home remedy.

Six people were assigned to Deir el-Medina as "water carriers" who were tasked to bring sacks of water to the village. Having a system in between a central cistern and door to door deliveries, the water carriers filled sacks and delivered them from the floodplain to a central location in the village where each household could receive a quarter to a half of a sack which would amount to ninety six to one hundred and fifteen liters of water per house. The typical household would have six residents, each would get fifteen to twenty liters of water for drinking. One ostracon describes how many of these deliveries were unfulfilled, where five people's rations were undelivered, totaling to four and three quarters sacks or three hundred and seventy five liters of water gone undelivered. On multiple occasions, the citizens of Deir el-Medina attempted to dig a well, presumably due to their displacement toward the water carriers, but to no avail. The first attempt was during the fifteenth year of Ramesses III where a hole was dug twenty two meters into the ground, but with no luck. Before digging another, they established the water table sat at thirty one and a half meters, and in a desperate attempt they dug twenty meters past that, to fifty two meters, but again it was futile. With no water in the well, it was used as a dump where hundreds more ostraca were found.

Economics were unique in Deir el-Medina as transactions between people were closer to trades than modern transactions. Actual money would rarely change hands, as it was more of a measure of worth for an object and when making a deal, trades between people would consider both the worth of each ends of the trade and whether the items presented were needed. Conveniently the most ostraca found were on economics and provide information on what these trades looked like. One such ostraca details a trade with one side offering a ox that was120 deben and the other offering two jars of fat, five smooth cloth tunics, one thin cloth kilt, and one hide which when put altogether were 130 deben.

References

McDowell, A.G. (2002), Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs, Oxford: Oxford University Press