THE CAT AND THE FAT

During the 19th Dynasty (ca. 1295–1186 B.c.), the village of Deir el-Medina, on the Nile’s west bank in Upper, or southern, Egypt, was home to a community of civil servants and artisans who built and decorated the royal tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings.

- BENJAMIN LEONARD

Scholars are on unusually familiar terms with these people. “As expert scribes and draftsmen, they left quite a lot of writing,” says Egyptologist Rob Demarée of Leiden University. At the site, archaeologists have excavated tens of thousands of texts written on papyrus and ostracons—discarded pieces of pottery or stone used like scrap paper. In 1997, Demarée began compiling these texts into an online database that now contains more than 5,000 records. Although some texts are accounts of mundane work, others paint a portrait of life in the ancient village.