From a purely emotional point of view, one could certainly say from today's perspective that the topic of work safety was not exactly attached importance to in Ancient Egypt. Herodotus reports (notabene, 2,000 years after construction!) that 100,000 people were constantly working on the construction of the Pyramid of Khufu in 3-month shifts; with 100,000 people on a single construction site, there must have been quite a bit of chaos. Today, we rather assume about 20,000 (unskilled) workers who were responsible for transporting building materials, especially during the floods; otherwise, about 5,000 "specialists" actually worked on the construction itself.
There are no records of "company doctors" from this large construction site, but accidents and injuries were probably common. In a workers' cemetery near the (somewhat older) pyramid of Snofru, some of the workers' skeletons show broken bones, some even with remnants of bandages. From later times, however, there is evidence of doctors who were responsible for the medical care of workers in quarries. The accidents there are likely to be very similar to those during pyramid construction.
Not only falling stones might have threatened the bones of the workers: A tomb depiction shows the treatment of work accidents, apparently during the construction of a shrine. In the upper right-hand corner a dislocated elbow is being repaired, in the lower left-hand corner an eye injury has to be treated.
The climatic conditions must also have made working in the royal necropolises in the desert an ordeal: At temperatures of 40 degrees, heat and thirst will certainly have caused workers to collapse. Under these conditions, it is only understandable that workers under Ramesses III went on strike when they did not receive their food and beer rations on time! The scorpions already mentioned in another article could also be dangerous to the workers. For this purpose, some construction sites seem to have had special "scorpion removers" that made the workplace safe before work began.
One of the richest sources for accounts of daily life is provided by the workers' settlement of Deir el-Medine in Thebes-West. In the New Kingdom, these workers and their families were settled there because they were responsible for the construction and furnishing of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. They were certainly privileged as far as their care was concerned, and apparently they were also entitled to medical care. Since the Ancient Egyptians were in no way inferior to us Germans in terms of bureaucracy, surprising documents have come down to us: A daily list was kept of which workers did not show up for work and for what reason. In fact, workers could apparently stay at home if they were too ill to work. It seems almost modern to us that workers also stayed at home when family members were ill and had to be cared for, or when a wife had a child. Whether this situation extended to every construction site at all times in history? In any case, such a thing was quite possible around 1300 BCE!
In addition to "stationary" construction sites, Egyptian workers were also on the move a lot: numerous expeditions have come down to us at all times in Egyptian history, especially to explore quarries and turquoise mines. In addition to soldiers, labourers and doctors, we encounter another occupational group here: embalmers. In the 1930s (BCE), a total of 30 embalmers took part in one expedition; apparently there had been many fatalities in a previous one. When everything else failed and nothing could be done for accident victims, the Egyptians apparently made provisions...
Literature
- H. Engelmann, J. Hallof, Zur medizinischen Nothilfe und Unfallversorgung auf staatlichen Arbeitsplätzen im alten Ägypten, in: ZÄS 122 (1995), p.104-136.
- J.J. Janssen, Absence from Work by the Necropolis Workmen of Thebes, in: SAK 8 (1980), p.127-152.
Cover picture
Transport of a statue, tomb of Djehutihotep, Deir el-Bershe
Picture in text
Tomb of Ipuy, MMA 30.4.116
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