Di Teodoro, M; (2015) Labour organisation in Middle Kingdom Egypt. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This thesis explores the organisation of labour in the Middle Kingdom through archaeological and textual data. Previous studies have focussed predominantly on the upper ranks of labour organisation and have favoured sites which yielded repertoires of ‘valuable’ objects. The aim of this thesis is to reconstruct labour organisation at the bottom end of administration and to understand how labour was embedded in the material world. Major lines of inquiry are the social profile and human activity of those strata of society liable to conscription, type of employments and temporality of work, management and administrative procedures in labour organisation. These questions will be addressed through a separate examination of textual sources and archaeological data. The archaeological record includes material from the late Middle Kingdom complex of Qasr es-Sagha (Faiyum) and the early 12th dynasty settlement in area F/1 of Tell el-Daba (Eastern Delta). The primary textual source are the papyri discovered by Flinders Petrie and Ludwig Borchardt at Lahun (Faiyum), integrated by other administrative documents and monuments such as funerary stelae and rock inscriptions. In the final chapters the outcomes reached by examining independently textual sources and archaeological evidence will be compared and combined. The discussion is meant to integrate different strands of the debate about the disciplines of history and archaeology that currently tend to co-exist separately. The result is a more balanced approach to the nature of the Middle Kingdom, described as either authoritarian or the golden age of Pharaonic culture.

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