When national events impinged upon the villagers' daily lives - when three royal tombs had to be made in six years, and when the villagers were forced to flee for safety to a nearby settlement - we begin to see clear evidence of stress and even, on occasion, disillusionment. Often these feel-ings are revealed in ironic drawings: emphasizing the sad gulf between the sacred office of divine Pharaoh and the mortals competing for possession of it, or making more general observations, no less perceptive, about the world in which they lived. One of the village artists made a sharp comment upon the court rivalries that had brought such danger to the village and caused the tombmakers so much hard work. In a halting red line on a limestone ostracon, the artist drew two chariots facing one another (see Plate ~9). One of the chariots holds a charioteer who steadies the horses and stands next to the damaged figure of a king. Both are in poses similar to those in the battle scenes on the walls of Theban temples. The other chariot holds a queen dressed in long transparent clothes, and she is loading a bow in a very business-like manner. Her opponent seems to be doing the same thing. Between the two chariots arrows fly in mid-air, loosed from the bows of both parties. This is certainly not a scene copied from a temple wall, for there we would never see, as on this stone, two regal Egyptians fighting each other. Obviously the most likely candidate for the identity of the battling Egyptian queen is Tausert, the most powerful presence behind the throne for two reigns, and a lady with her own tomb in the royal valley. The king she fights doubtless represents one of the monarchs who followed Merneptah briefly to the throne. But so charming is the drawing, so lively are the horses, so carefully judged the gesture of loading the bow, that its acidic comment is almost obscured. For here one of the royal tombmakers has taken elements from traditional triumphal scenes and turned these bland sentiments into a comment on contemporary history; a time when Egyptians fought not uncivilized foreigners, but each other. It is difficult to say to what extent we can define this drawing as satire. Like artists of all periods the ancient draughtsmen worked inside conventions, using parti-cular poses and attitudes almost instinctively. Egyptian art supplied the ancient people with a discreet vision of themselves, one remarkably different from any modern concept of man; a public vision of a stressless, solid society, as unruffled as a Victorian prime minister. But with his small sketch the village draughtsman has given us the equivalent of Queen Victoria and Bertie sparring together with boxing gloves and safety helmets.

The huge public image of a strong, calm state that offered all the security of a pious feudalism reflected conditions that had not existed at Thebes for a long time. Slowly, during the first century of life at the tombmaker's village, the mood had changed. Individuals started to appear, people who worried, prayed to personal gods, recorded personal experience rather than bland sentiment, and who were, perhaps, more superstitious (for they had sensed the unknown). These people would go to their graves not merely as happy servants of the state machine assured of their place in the next world by the status of the man they served on earth, but as individuals who had provided themselves with their own magic passports and amulets for their journey and who, once they had arrived with the gods, would stand singly before them for judgement. The innocent little drawing of the fighting king and queen is only a tiny part of this gradual change of attitude.

If the recalcitrant medjay had not eventually paid up and the village tribunal had decided against him, bailiffs would have been sent first to collect the debtor and bring him before the court, then to the debtor's home to extract either the goods or their just equivalent. The court's bailiffs were the doorkeepers of the royal tomb. Usually allotted to each of the gangs, the two of them kept the storerooms in the Great Place and were under the control of the senior scribes. Along with the medjay, doorkeepers were also used by the state scribes to collect the wheat taxes levied upon farmers throughout Egypt: they were in fact the pointed end of the law. As the wheat-collecting was frequently accompanied by beatings and searches to find hidden stores inside peasant houses, they were not greatly beloved by the community at large. One such doorkeeper, a senior, who worked at the Great Place and regularly acted as a bailiff of the village court during Mentmose's and Menna's time was Khaemwase. The village scribes record him collecting an ass for payment, and taking a woman debtor down to answer to a court in session in the compound of Ramesses TT'S temple. One debtor, though, was not impressed with the gravity of the law or the person of Khaemwase, its erstwhile representative. 'The magistrate sent the doorkeeper Khaemwase, saying "Go to his [the debtor's] house and bring whatever you will find there".' So Khaemwase duly set off and finding the debtor's house empty he entered it and took the clothes that were the subject of the dispute. Then the debtor returned and with scant respect for this representative of law and order, he 'beat Khaemwase, seized the clothes which he had brought from his house and took them away'. 'I am still unpaid today,' the plaintiff complained mournfully.

Penalties for non-payment of a debt or an agreement could be severe and sometimes a debtor was required to pay two or three times the value of the goods that he owed. The kindly Foreman Hay, however, was contented in his own lawsuit with retrieving the value of the donkey he had loaned to a workman and which had died under his care. Such disputes were common, as the relatively rich tombmakers frequently loaned their beasts to both the medjay and the servants who brought water and provisions up to the village.
 

The oracles also had powers to 'see into people's hearts', demanding higher loyalties than the traditional more easy-going deities. They also brought with them a crippling fear of deity and its fateful capriciousness. Iust as all believers who appeal to such supernatural powers to settle their future lives return to them again and again, so in the last decades of the Theban Kingdom, when the kings had retreated to the north of Egypt, far away from the High Priests of Amun and their fearful statues, all the major state decisions were sanctioned by the oracular gods.

In Foreman Nekhenmut's day, however, people were still self-confident enough to talk straight back to an erring oracle and even barter with the god as one might with a travelling merchant. At one Opet Feast procession a workman appealed to a statue of Amun to help recover some stolen property 'and the god nodded very greatly'. Then he read out all the names of his townspeople and at one point the god nodded, meaning 'it is him who has stolen them', at which the alleged culprit piped up and said, 'It is false, it is not I who have stolen them.' The god, it is reported, was then exceedingly wroth but, nothing daunted, the accused man then went off to another oracle who, he thought, would be a better judge of his actions. This god, too, accused him of the theft. Indignantly the poor man then went to a third oracle and cried before it, 'Help me, Oh beloved Lord! It is not I who took the clothes.' His hopes were finally dashed when this god too, declared his guilt to the assembled crowd. Then a beating by the god's priests produced an effect that the combined offlces of the gods had not achieved, and the man agreed to return the clothes to the workman and was even made to swear an oath that 'If I go back on what I have said I will be thrown to a crocodile.' It seems, then, as if the unfortunate appellant had regarded the 'stolen' clothes as his rightful property.

The names of celebrated eye-doctors have survived from the period a thousand years or more before the tombmakers' village was founded and one imagines that, whatever the modern opinions of their theories, such fame must have attended success. But the formulae they have left us to reproduce for their medications, which contain such ingredients as tortoise brains and caustic soda, to be applied directly to the eyes, smack more of desperation than of reasoned treatment. It is difficult to believe that the same physicians who had so carefully observed and described a wide variety of eye conditions would not have used their sharp diagnostic eye to recognize that these written remedies were hardly efficacious. We must imagine, then, that it was the practical application of simple nursing methods - irrigating damaged eyes with water, carefully removing foreign bodies from them and sheltering them from bright lights and further infections - that these doctors used as their really effective cures. But, as the villagers believed that illness was visited upon them by the gods, so ancient medicine treated the whole person, not merely the injured body, and it was by these criteria that the ancient doctors were held to be efficient. Neferabu's blindness was probably treated with simple medications of honey and kohl, the traditional cosmetic and a mild antiseptic, applied to his eyes. At the same time, prayers, spells and sympathetic support were treatments afforded to the frightened artist. Eventually Neferabu managed to treat his condition himself by recognizing its root causes: blasphemy and perjury.

I was an ignorant man and foolish, who knew neither good nor evil- I called upon my mistress, I found that she came to me with sweet breezes. She was merciful to me, having made me see her hand. She turned to me again in mercy, she made me forget my sickness, for the Peak of the West is merciful if one calls upon her.

Perhaps Neferabu was lucky: we can imagine that he might have been temporarily stricken by a blood clot which spontaneously dissolved, or some such similar happening. Or perhaps we might term his blindness hysterical, caused by a pious terror of his own actions, and when he repented, his punishment, blindness, simply vanished with the sin. But such explanations were quite irrelevant to Neferabu, for both he and his friends had recognized the cause of his illness and the cure had completely vindicated their diagnosis. Neferabu, a village elder with a large family, set up several stelae that publicly recorded those awesome events. And as the prayers of a blinded painter have a particular pathos, one is thankful that his gods cured him.

Whoever is born on this day will die of old age. Whoever is born on this day will die of plague.

It is probable that on the days these calendars identified as inauspicious, no work was done at the Great Place. Some days, indeed, were considered so dangerous that the almanac advised its readers to stay indoors altogether!

But such dates in the calendar were only a small percentage of the many breaks in the work at the royal tomb: there were also state festivals, personal and family festivals, regular rest days and other village events. Like most non-industrial societies, Pharaonic Egypt usually underemployed its labour force: late in the reign of Ramesses II' it is probable that the tombmakers worked only one day in four at the royal tombs. And in the early years of the reign the Feasts of the Valley and of Opet were made six days longer than in Ramose's day and some eleven days longer than they had been during the old dynasty.