In Unity, There is Strength

As near as I can tell, this is the earliest recorded example of a labor strike.  It's in Egypt, around 12,000 BCE.

Artisans were not being paid in a timely manner to make art glorifying Pharaoh, so they stopped until they got paid.

“1768 is really when the word ‘strike’ begins to develop out of the UK.”

That’s the view of classicist Sarah E Bond, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

As Bond explains, the word ‘strike’ comes from a moment when sailors in the port of Sunderland decided to literally strike down the topsails of their ships, immobilising them until their demands were met by their bosses. The tactic worked, spread south to the shipyards of the Thames, and quickly entered the political vocabulary.

I did not know this entomological fact, but now I do, and so do my reader(s).

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One of the earliest, clearest examples of what would now be termed a ‘strike’ comes from ancient Egypt – a civilisation that was rigidly hierarchical and dominated by unquestionable royal authority. Beneath the monumental architecture and other cultural feats, Egyptian society depended on a vast pool of labour.

In the second millennium BC, during the reign of Ramesses III, Egypt had passed the peak of imperial expansion it had enjoyed a century earlier. Ramesses III ruled during the early 12th century BC, at the end of the New Kingdom, a period marked by mounting economic pressure, as well as internal and external instability.

Ramesses III presented himself as a traditional warrior-pharaoh, defending Egypt against repeated Libyan incursions and threats from other foreign enemies, such as the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’. Reliefs and inscriptions depict the pharaoh’s decisive victories, but modern historians view his reign as one of crisis management, with Egyptian prosperity faltering. Not only was the kingdom embroiled in expensive wars, but agricultural output was stalling.

Despite these pressures, Ramesses III occupied an impossibly powerful position. The Egyptian pharaoh was viewed as a divine intermediary, responsible for maintaining maat – a religious notion of cosmic order that guaranteed harmony between gods, people and nature. Feeding workers, paying temple staff and sustaining major construction projects were all part of that sacred duty.

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The strike itself unfolded at Deir el-Medina, a purpose-built village housing the highly skilled artisans who carved and painted the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. These workers were salaried state employees, exempt from agricultural work, housed by the government and supplied directly from royal granaries. Many were literate, and they left behind letters, complaints and administrative records that give historians a rare view into the lives of non-elite Egyptians.

But because they didn’t farm their own food, missed deliveries of their payment left them vulnerable. When Ramesses III’s administration fell badly behind on promised rations, families at Deir el-Medina faced serious consequences.

“The necropolis workers decided that they were going to go on strike until they got the rations and payment that they were promised by the pharaoh,” Bond says.

The workers peacefully withdrew their labour entirely and carefully chose their protest site. Their actions were documented by local scribes, making this the earliest recorded labour strike in human history.

“They decided that they were going to go and sit in the back of a temple, and that they were simply going to refuse to work until they were given the back payments.”

Temples in ancient Egypt were sanctuaries of non-violence. Fighting and bloodshed within them was taboo. It’s for that reason that “going and sitting in peaceful protest at the back of a temple, or just outside a temple, was something that became extremely common in Pharaonic Egypt, and continued well into the Ptolemaic period and beyond.”

A note here, for those of you who are not familiar with the history, this was in the midst of the Late Bronze Age collapse, which likely contributed to the problems.

Neat stuff.