As well as being a burial ground, however links of london, it was also, in ancient times as today, a hive of bustle and activity, full of laborers, craftsmen, artists, guards, scribes and administrative officials. It was this living, vibrant aspect of the Valley that particularly interested us.
To condense four years painstaking excavation into a single article is impossible Links of London Charms, and so I shall gloss over much of what we did and found — including the missing corner of the pharaoh Horemheb’s sarcophagus and the ostracon (small limestone flake) bearing the name of a hitherto unknown Ramessid queen — and instead home in on just one area of our work: Links of London Bracelets trying to find out more about the men who actually dug and decorated the tombs.
As it happens we already know quite a lot about them from earlier excavations at Deir el-Medina, a site about two kilometers away on the other side of the Theban Hills where they and their families lived.
Known in ancient times as Set Maat, the Place of Truth, this ancient village has yielded literally thousands of papyri fragments and ostraca from which we have learnt everything from the workmen’s names, addresses and specialist crafts to the court cases they were involved in and whose wife they were knocking off. There is even a record of the world’s first industrial dispute, when, during the reign of Ramesses lll (1194-1163 BC)Links of London Rings, workers downed tools and staged a temple sit-in because they had not received their promised rations of grain.