Accounting for Sick Days: A Scalar Approach to Health and Disease at Deir el-Medina

Abstract

Despite prominent previous research on disease in ancient Egypt through studies of human remains and Egyptian medical texts, we still know relatively little about how disease impacted daily life. This is especially true for short-term diseases, which leave no mark in the skeletal record and are often described only generally in medical texts. In this study, I use a scalar approach to analyze records recording absences from work at Deir el-Medina during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, focusing on understanding how short-term diseases affected morbidity patterns at the site. At the broadest scale, I use a corpus of work texts to demonstrate a seasonal distribution of absences which can be accounted for by the seasonality of infectious disease in Upper Egypt. I then offer a circumstantial case for the contagion of one infectious disease in O. BM 5634 by identifying its transmission through the sequential absences of different workmen in the entire gang. Finally, I evaluate the impact of one disease on one workman through a close reading of the absences of Mr-%xm.t in O. Cairo CG 25785. This text elucidates how expectations for a workman’s productivity were likely harmful to his well-being. I then combine these three levels of analysis to explore the social and economic ramifications these diseases would have had on both individual workmen and workforce productivity at Deir el-Medina. Many scholars have examined the paleopathology of human remains in ancient Egypt and the history of Egyptian medicine.1 Their publications offer numerous detailed accounts of the kinds of diseases present in ancient Egypt and their remedies, but they offer relatively little information about the impact of shortterm diseases on daily life. Lesions from such diseases would not become manifest skeletally, and medical texts are often missing diagnostic criteria to reveal the