No wheat for bread? No barley for beer?
And so no work!

For years the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt were buried in the Valley of the Kings, the great underground tombs were excavated in the hard stone by specialized groups. This men, later, were described as slaves with a miserable existence, victims of brutal conditions of exploitation.
But was it all true?
The Pharaohs were so cruel and pitiless?
According to some inscriptions found in the tombs, a group of these men, workers and not slaves, organized the first strike in history. When the pharaoh Thutmose I decided, to protect himself from the violators of the tombs, to build an underground tomb, in the area later called the Valley of the Kings, his successors followed his example for the whole period of the first three dynasties of the New Reign.

The task was hard.
It was necessary to dig in the bare stone, create passages, secret openings and feigned rooms.
All this was entrusted to a kind of craftmade corporation, also in charge of the decorating of the internal walls of the tombs. The craftsmen lived in a village built for them in a dry area of the desert known as “Place of the truth”: Deir el-Medina. The men were organized in two groups, guided by a supervisor, and worked for eight hours a day, for eight following days. The ninth and the tenth day they could rest and go back to their families. They didn’t work neither on the great celebrations in honor of the gods. The salary was paid monthly in kind, wheat for the bread and barley for the beer, all of which came from the royal properties. To each group several slaves were assigned to prepare the flour, some washer-men were assigned to the wash and the potters had to repair the vases which had been broken during the work. The workers received, besides, shares of fish and vegetables, wood for fire and body oil, necessary to work in the heat and the dust. The pharaoh himself, once in a while, rewarded his workers with valuable goods such as meat, wine, salt and Asiatic beer. Isolated, and unable to cultivate gardens, the people of the village could count upon only the punctuality of the supplying that, usually arrived the twenty-eighth day of the month. It so happened, anyway, that during the reign of Ramses III, the supplies didn’t arrive for several weeks. The workers left their work tools and went to the great funeral temple of Ramses II. They orderly sat, refusing to go back to work before the pharaoh was informed about their situation. A scribe, once he listened to their reasons, ordered that shares of wheat, which were actually assigned to the scribes, should be given to the men, in the quantity sufficient for a month. Other strikes were organized in the following months to obtain the arrears. According to what we know, nobody was punished for daring to dictate conditions to the pharaoh and according to the evidence it seems that the pharaohs were far from being the cruel despots sometimes described.