The First Recorded Labor Strike Was in Ancient Egypt

Around 1157 BCE, in the 29th regnal year of Ramesses III, the skilled artisans who carved and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings stopped working. Their grain rations, the state-issued payment that fed their families, had arrived late. So the crews from the workers’ village of Deir el-Medina walked off the job and staged a sit-in at nearby funerary temples.

The protest is recorded on the Turin Strike Papyrus, written in hieratic script by the scribe Amennakht and now held by the Museo Egizio in Turin. It describes workers passing the control post and refusing to return until they were fed.

“We are here because of the famine and thirst,” the men declared, demanding their overdue provisions.

Because it is the first such episode documented in writing, scholars treat it as the oldest recorded labor strike in history. Officials eventually distributed rations, but the stoppages recurred, exposing the strain on Egypt’s late-New-Kingdom economy.