RAMESSES III AND THE FEUDAL STATE
Ramesses III was probably the last king in whose reign Thebes maintained the delicate balance of a true feudal state. In the early decades of his rule the country regained some of its old confidence, and though future kings would still hold the trappings of Pharaoh and be honoured in the Theban temples, the unity of the pious state would split into the joint components of public politicization and individual piety. The news of Ramesses t'~'s death, in the thirty-second year of his rule, travelled swiftly to the men of the Great Place: 'Third month of summer, day sixteen [18 April 1149 BC] Chief Medjay Mentmose came to say to the people of the tomb: "The Falcon King Usermaatre-miamun, Son of Re [Ramesses III] has flown up to Heaven, and the King Usermastre Setepenamun [Ramesses IV], son of Re Ramesses-miamun sits on the throne of Re in his place".' That same day the scribe's workjournal noted simply that 'The Falcon has flown up to Heaven.' Though the kings lived and died in the north of Egypt, they would always return to Thebes for their burial in the Great Place. On 6 June that same year, the royal funeral equipment was carried to the tomb, the heavier pieces of statuary and furniture being dragged up the long valley leading from the plain, in temperatures of well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Twenty days later the royal funeral procession brought the King himself to his tomb, where he was laid in his fine pink sarcophagus; as the Greek traveller Herodotus would report some 600 years later, the time between death and burial in royal Egypt was precisely seventy days.

Four days after the burial, a senior member of the new King's staff came to the Great Place and confirmed some promotions in the two gangs. Before setting off for the north again he also rewarded the gangs for their efforts under the summer's sun. As well as receiving silver vases 'from Askelon' (probably sent originally to the vizier's office from Palestine), Foreman Anhirkawi received gifts of fine linens, oils, honey and cream and some extra supplies of basic foods. So delighted was he at this most unusual display of vizierial benevolence that he had its details written upon two stelae which were set up in his tomb chapel and the village Hathor chapel; a permanent record of his high favour at the royal court.
 

THE STRIKE AND THE SQUEEZE

None the less, it appears that a large part of the monthly wheat ration was not arriving at the village and, with the limited storage facilities available in the little houses, there would indeed have been a wheat shortage within a few weeks. With some 500 people dependent upon the regular deliveries of such rations to the desert village - the sixty or so tombworkers as well as their families and servants - the village had become a large consumer of the state resources at Thebes. And wheat had a remarkably stable market value, one sack of about a hundredweight - one khar - being worth about two-fifths of a pound - two deben - of copper. A workman's monthly ration, four khar, would feed about sixteen people on the village diet. Foremen and scribes' rations were more than a third larger than that - a total of eleven pounds of bread per family every day in a diet that also included a variety of other foods as well. So with families and dependents numbering, on average, eight or ten people, it was a very generous ration, one unequalled in other ancient societies and, indeed, in many countries today. Through the reduction of their grain ration the tombmakers were actually being deprived of a regular income, being caught in a pnancral squeeze. What at first sight appears to be a pathetic appeal for sustenance is nothing less than a heart-felt complaint by a member of a professional middle class couched in the hyperbole of the day.

Late in the second month of Ramesses III's twenty-ninth year - in July 1152 BC - Scribe Amennakht was also caught up in these disputes about the wheat ration. 'This day,' he announced to the gangs, 'twenty days have elapsed in the month and rations have not been given to us.' In the pounding summer heat he walked down from the valley of the village and across the sand to the temple of King Horemheb which stood next to the looming temple-fortress of Ramesses III. There, royal officials 'brought forty-six khar of wheat' which were delivered to the villagers just 'two days later'. It is on the same ostracon that he used to record his protest that Amennakht also noted that 'The office of the King promoted the Vizier To to be the Vizier of the Land of Upper and Lower Egypt'; an indication perhaps that the administration had not performed well, and that the amalgamation of these two offices was an attempt to increase its efficiency. Amennakht went to a royal temple to protest at the lack of rations because it was from the temple granaries that the village wheat came. Presumably this was also where the officials that controlled the grain supplies worked. At a most conservative estimate the grain magazines of the temple of King Horemheb could hold - and this in an enclosure that has not yet been fully excavated -sufficient stocks to last the village for ten years. And the ~zo magazines of Horemheb's temple were of comparatively modest size; the twenty largest buildings in the vast complex of granaries built by the temple of Ramesses ~' -long barrel-vaulted chambers of mud brick - each held more than two years' supplies for the village! The reserves of grain at Thebes - taken from all over Egypt - were colossal. Why then, this sudden squeeze?

For one thing, it is likely that the extravagant enterprise of Ramesses III's building programme at Thebes had temporarily depleted the Theban grain reserves during the last ten years of the reign. Although the temple granaries could easily cushion the effects of a succession of bad harvests - a reputation that these 'granaries of Pharaoh' hold in the Bible - after many years of feeding large workforces of masons and labourers stocks may have been unusually low. As an outlying flank of the royal economy, the tombmakers had become highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the royal fortunes and, in times of stress, would be the first to feel ill effects. There was also a growing corruption at this time: one small temple alone lost more than go per cent of its northern grain revenues to corrupt officials; this amount, though a mere drop in Egypt's ocean of grain, would have sustained the village ration for a third of a year. And this embezzlement went undetected for ten years.