This series is published with the authorization of Professor Jin Shoufu. This is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker based on Jin Shoufu’s Ancient Egyptian Civilization. It is neither a newly written eyewitness travel account by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction of his book.

The second frame of the roll is a painting in full color: a king stands before three gods, Amun, his wife Mut and their son Khonsu. The king is Ramesses III.

Unrolled, the papyrus runs to more than forty meters, the longest roll ancient Egypt has left us. Its first line gives a date: year 32 of Ramesses III, third month of the Harvest season, day 6. Across the thousand-odd lines that follow, the king speaks to the gods again and again, and he speaks like a man who is already dead.

He was dead. In 2012 a research team ran a CT scan of his mummy and found, under a thick collar of linen around the neck, a deep cut across the throat. The embalmers had placed an Eye of Horus amulet in the wound. A judicial papyrus in Turin records a conspiracy in the harem: Queen Tiye, with women of the palace and high officials, tried to put her own son on the throne in place of the appointed heir.

The appointed heir took the throne all the same. He was Ramesses IV. After his father’s death, the new king had this roll produced in haste: an account of what the late king had given the gods in thirty-one years.

Today it is called the Great Harris Papyrus, and it is in the British Museum. What it records is the wealth of Egypt’s temples: how many people, how many cattle, how much land, how much grain and silver and gold coming in and going out.

I. A Ledger Made in a Hurry

In 1906 the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted worked through the roll’s figures. He noticed that the old annual feasts of every temple were recorded exactly thirty-one times. For year 32 only one feast appeared, the anniversary of the king’s coronation, and nothing after it. From this he concluded that the date at the head of the roll was the day the king died. The chronology of the New Kingdom published in 1976 by the American scholars Edward Wente and Charles Van Siclen puts the death on day 15 of the same month, nine days after the date on the roll, so what that date actually marks has been read in more than one way.

The accounts came in separately from the three great temples: Amun of Thebes, Re of Heliopolis and Ptah of Memphis. The three sections differ in handwriting and spelling and were written by three scribes. Another scribe wrote the section on the smaller temples, and yet another the historical section at the end.

Signs of haste are everywhere. Totals are often added wrongly, and several sizable temples are left out altogether. Breasted guessed that the scribes at Heliopolis and Memphis first had to receive their instructions from Thebes and then get their reports back before the king’s funeral, which left them very little time. Some reports from the smaller temples probably never arrived.

In his view the roll was meant to be placed in the king’s tomb. It sets out the king’s merits before the gods item by item: I gave you all this, so treat me well in the world beyond. It also asks the gods for many blessings on the new king, Ramesses IV, which was probably one of the son’s reasons for having it made.

II. Eighty-Six Thousand People

The first list in the Theban section is headed: things, cattle, gardens, lands, ships, workshops and towns that Pharaoh gave to the house of Amun, Mut, Khonsu and all the gods of Thebes, as property forever.

The list begins with people. The temple Ramesses III built for himself at Medinet Habu, on the west bank, held 62,626 people. The Luxor temple held more than 2,600. Add the people attached to the herds, a royal city, captives from Syria and Nubia and others, and Amun’s household came to 86,486 people.

Then come 421,362 head of cattle large and small, 433 gardens and groves, 83 ships, 46 workshops, 56 towns in Egypt and 9 in Syria and Kush. The fields come to more than 864,000 stat, which Breasted converted to about 580,000 acres, more than 2,300 square kilometers.

Jin Shoufu notes that some scholars believe the priests and dependants of the Karnak temple under Ramesses III numbered more than eighty thousand. The figures in the ledger are of exactly that order.

For the whole country, the temples held a little over a hundred thousand people, nearly 490,000 head of cattle and about 720,000 acres of land. Comparing this with Egypt’s registered farmland in the early twentieth century, Breasted estimated that the temples owned about one-seventh of the country’s land. As for people, roughly one Egyptian in fifty to eighty belonged to a temple, never more than two percent. Of all that temple land, eight-tenths belonged to Amun of Thebes.

III. Old Estates under New Names

With numbers this large, had Ramesses III emptied the country and handed it all to the gods?

Breasted looked more closely and found it was not so simple. The ledger divides each god’s wealth into several lists: one is the god’s property forever, one his yearly income, and only another is labeled the king’s gifts, recorded from year 1 to year 31.

Much of the property forever had long belonged to the gods. The ledger says the king “made” a great vineyard called Kanekeme for Amun, but that vineyard belonged to the mortuary temple of Ramesses II before Ramesses III was born. The king counted the confirmation of old holdings as gifts of his own. In the other direction, new things were mixed into the old estate. One herd was named after the king’s victory over the Meshwesh of Libya, and its keepers were 971 Meshwesh captives.

So the roll is a rare general inventory that shows, for the first time, how rich Egypt’s three great temples really were. It is also a record of the king’s merits, and the figures do not reveal which gifts were really new from Ramesses III. Some scholars today think this flood of donations drained the royal stores. Both readings exist, and the ledger itself cannot settle the matter.

IV. Sitting Behind the Temple

In year 29 of Ramesses III, three years before this ledger was written, trouble broke out on the west bank at Thebes.

The craftsmen who built the king’s tomb lived in the village of Deir el-Medina. They did not farm; they were paid in grain each month. That year, in the second month of the Inundation season, day 21 came and still no grain had been handed out. The village scribe Amennakht announced to the crew that twenty days of the month had passed and their rations had not been given. Then he went to the temple of Horemheb in the estate of Amun, obtained forty-six measures of emmer, and two days later it reached the workmen. The episode is recorded on an ostracon now in Berlin.

A few months later things came to a head. On day 10 of the second month of the Growing season, the whole crew passed the five guard posts of the necropolis, shouting that they were hungry and that eighteen days of the month had already gone by. They walked to the back of the temple of Thutmose III and sat down. The scribe, the foremen and the police officers came and shouted at them to go back. The workmen swore great oaths and said they had matters concerning Pharaoh to raise. That night they slept in the necropolis.

The next day they reached the southern gate of the enclosure of the temple of Ramesses II. On the third day they went into the temple and spent the night at its entrance. Officials came out to hear them. Hunger and thirst had driven them there, they said: there was no clothing, no ointment, no fish, no vegetables. Write to Pharaoh, write to the vizier, so that they might be given food. That same day the overdue ration for the previous month was handed out.

The record is now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, written by the scribe Amennakht. It is called the first recorded strike in history.

Each time, the places where they sat down lay at the foot of temples. The row of temples on the west bank were “temples of millions of years” that kings built for their afterlives; in the Ramesside period it was often their storerooms that supplied the offerings at Karnak across the river. Jin Shoufu cites a figure: the granaries attached to this temple could hold more than 226,000 sacks of grain, about 16.5 million liters, enough to feed 3,400 families for a year.

But granaries could run empty. In the last days of the Growing season the vizier To sent word. It was not for no reason that he had not come, he said, and not because there was nothing to bring. Had he been made vizier in order to take their rations away? It so happened that there was nothing in the granaries, but he would give them whatever he had found. The workmen received half their ration. In the first month of the Harvest season they sat down again, behind the temple of Merenptah. The mayor of Thebes was passing by, and he promised fifty sacks of emmer to keep them going until Pharaoh issued their rations.

Amid all the quarrels, one workman denounced a fellow villager: the man had led away an ox branded with the mark of the temple of Ramesses II and kept it in his own stable.

V. Ox Heads, Cakes and Gold

That a temple should hand out supplies to workmen was nothing unusual. Jin Shoufu cites another ostracon from Deir el-Medina on which a temple gives the royal tomb-builders nine portions of beef and eleven ox heads, perhaps part of their regular pay, perhaps a bonus. This, he says, is far from the usual idea of the temple as a purely consuming institution.

Temples had several sources of income: sponsorship and gifts from wealthy people round about, war booty granted by the king, and their own fields, herds and workshops. Once offerings had been placed on the altar and the rituals were over, what was left could be sold.

In Cairo there are two older papyri from the Eighteenth Dynasty: Papyrus Boulaq 11 and its continuation, Cairo 58081. As Jin Shoufu describes them, they record a temple issuing beef, cakes and wine to six regular recipients. These six are called shutiu in Egyptian, a word close to the modern “trader.” One day a trader named Sheribin took away three pieces of leg meat, two heads and a few other cuts, valued at one shat of gold. Papyrus Boulaq 11 notes specifically that the trader who received beef paid the temple two units of gold. Jin Shoufu concludes that the temple had staff in charge of what can fairly be called commerce.

The Great Harris Papyrus has a similar entry. Over thirty-one years, the silver the temples received for selling goods they had collected came, for Thebes alone, to more than 3,600 deben, over three hundred kilograms.

VI. The Priest Who Collected for the King

With so much wealth, did the temples become states of their own and compete with the king?

Papyrus British Museum 10401 shows another side. A Chief Taxing-Master traveled south along the Nile and took metals, garments, cattle and vegetables from temples and priests at Elephantine, Kom Ombo, Edfu and other places. Jin Shoufu takes this to mean that the king could exempt temples from taxes and also had the right to tax them. Jac Janssen, the Dutch scholar who published the papyrus, is far more cautious: it does not say where the goods went or whether they were taxes.

On a wall beside the Eighth Pylon at Karnak another scene is carved. In year 10 of Ramesses IX, Amenhotep, High Priest of Amun, was led into the great forecourt of the temple. The king told the officials at his side to give him many rewards of gold and silver and good things, because of the many fine monuments he had built in the house of Amun. In the reading of the German scholar Wolfgang Helck, the inscription also praises him for having had Amun’s income and provisions brought to Pharaoh, calling this the deed of a good servant of Pharaoh. The rewards included gold collars and silver vessels. By the usual conversion the gold came to nearly two kilograms, though some scholars think it was far less.

Amenhotep’s father, Ramessesnakht, had also been High Priest of Amun. In year 3 of Ramesses IV, the king sent him at the head of an expedition to the Wadi Hammamat in the Eastern Desert, to quarry dark hard stone from the mountain of Bekhen for royal monuments. A stela in the wadi lists the party: 5,000 infantry, 2,000 laborers belonging to Pharaoh’s estate, 130 quarrymen and stonecutters, two draughtsmen and four sculptors, 8,368 men in all, and 900 dead who were not counted in that total. Supplies came in ten carts, each drawn by six yoke of oxen. One of the quarry chiefs was, by his regular office, overseer of the herds of the temple of Ramesses III, and the herd he managed is recorded in the Great Harris Papyrus.

Ramessesnakht also oversaw expeditions to the Eastern Desert for gold and galena. Galena was the raw material for eye paint, and once it was brought back it was sent on to the palace.

Two generations of Amun’s high priests collected for the king, quarried for the king and found pigment for the king. Temple wealth kept moving through the state.

VII. It Was Not About Money

Many people still believe that Akhenaten’s religious reform grew out of a conflict between the crown and the priesthood: the temple of Amun had become too rich, and the king set out to curb it.

Jin Shoufu reports the view of the German scholar Jan Assmann that in an early civilization like Egypt’s, conflict between church and state, or their separation, was unthinkable. In Egyptian theology the king was the high priest of every god, and the high priests of the temples and their subordinates exercised religious authority on his behalf. Akhenaten left Thebes because he believed it was defiled by gods he did not worship. He chose Amarna, untouched ground, so that he could devote himself to the one god Aten. Most scholars now hold that the temples were never the king’s economic rivals, let alone a threat.

The Dutch scholar Ben Haring, surveying the Ramesside evidence, comes to much the same conclusion. Older Egyptology liked to cast the temples as economic rivals of the government; recent studies stress how the temples were built into the state.

Yet Breasted saw something else in the Karnak reward scene. The two officials reaching up to hang collars on the High Priest can reach only a little above his waist: he is drawn as tall as the king. By ancient convention the king’s figure should tower far above his subjects. Breasted read the scene as a sign that the high priests were rising, step by step, to equal the pharaoh.

VIII. The Last Pages of the Ledger

In the last pages of the Great Harris Papyrus the king turns to speak to the living.

Ramesses III says he planted trees throughout the land so that the people could sit in their shade. A woman of Egypt could go wherever she wished, and no stranger or anyone else on the road molested her. The infantry and the chariotry stayed at home, their bows and weapons laid up in the storerooms. He kept the whole land alive, foreigners and Egyptians, men and women.

Then he says that he has gone to rest in the world below, and that Amun has set his son on the throne. He tells everyone to cling to the new king’s sandals, kiss the ground before him, drag monuments for him and dig canals for him, so as to enjoy his favor and receive his rations every day.

Three years before these words were written, the tomb-builders had sat behind the temples and shouted that they were hungry.

In 1855 local people dug the ledger out of a hole in the floor of an ordinary cliff tomb near Deir el-Medina, from under a heap of mummies, together with several other rolls. The tomb lay right beside the village where those workmen had lived. They showed a sack of papyri to Anthony Charles Harris, a collector living in Alexandria, who bought the longest roll. In 1872 the British Museum bought it from Miss Selima Harris.

Notes

1. Opening date and painting: Breasted, §153: “the papyrus is dated on the sixth of Epiphi” (Epiphi is the third month of the Harvest season). The vignette: British Museum collection page EA9999,2: “Papyrus Harris; frame 2; full colour vignette showing Ramesses III before the Triad of Thebes; part of the Discourse to the Gods.” Length: Breasted, §152, “no less than 133 feet long, and containing 117 columns” (about 40.5 m); the curator’s comment on the same British Museum page: “the full roll was forty-two meters long before it was divided.” The title uses a round figure between the two. 2. CT findings: Hawass et al., BMJ 345 (2012): e8268, from the abstract (full text not seen): “Computed tomography scans revealed a deep cut in Ramesses III's throat, probably made by a sharp knife. During the mummification process, a Horus eye amulet was inserted in the wound for healing purposes, and the neck was covered by a collar of thick linen layers.” The authors’ conclusion is phrased as “suggests.” 3. The harem conspiracy: Museo Egizio, Turin, Cat. 1875: “The instigator was queen Tiye who, together with other women from the Pharaoh’s harem and several people in high positions in the government, tried to place Tiye's son Pentaweret on the throne instead of the appointed heir.” The museum notes that the papyrus does not explicitly mention the king’s death. 4. Dating and haste: Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt IV (1906), §§153–155: “The document was evidently put together as rapidly as possible after the king’s death”; “the sections furnished by the three main temples ... were written by three different scribes”; “their reports failed to arrive in time” (the last is his conjecture). Death on day 15: Edward F. Wente and Charles C. Van Siclen III, “A Chronology of the New Kingdom,” in Studies in Honor of George R. Hughes (SAOC 39, Chicago, 1976), p. 235: “he died in Year 32, III šmw 15 (April) after a reign of thirty-one years, one month, nineteen days.” 5. Purpose: ibid., §152: “It was compiled at his death by his son, to be placed in the king’s tomb, and is distinctly mortuary in its character and purpose”; “So prominent are these prayers for Ramses IV that they must also have formed a strong motive for the preparation of the document by him.” 6. Amun’s estate: ibid., §222 heading: “List of things, cattle, gardens, lands, galleys, workshops, and towns, which Pharaoh, L. P. H., gave to the house of his august father, Amon-Re, king of gods, Mut, Khonsu, and all the gods of Thebes, as property forever and ever”; Medinet Habu “heads 62,626,” Luxor “heads 2,623” (§223); “Total heads 86,486” (§225); cattle 421,362, gardens 433, land 864,168⅓ stat, ships 83, workshops 46, towns of Egypt 56, towns of Syria and Kush 9 (§§226–27). One stat is about two-thirds of an acre (§152 n.); Amun’s land is 583,313.57 acres (§167). 7. Eighty thousand at Karnak: base text, Lecture 10, section 10.3, on the temples of Karnak and Luxor, which reports some scholars’ view that the priests and dependants of Karnak under Ramesses III exceeded eighty thousand. 8. National proportions: Breasted, §166: “one person in from fifty to eighty of the population belonged to the temples. In no case were more than 2 per cent. of the people temple property”; §167: “the temples owned nearly one-seventh, or over 14½ per cent., of the land.” His corrected totals are 107,615 people (the papyrus has 113,433), 490,386 cattle and 1,070,419 stat, about 722,533 acres (table, p. 97). “Eight-tenths to Amun” is calculated from that table (583,313 of 722,533 acres). 9. Old estates: ibid., §158 (Kanekeme “was in existence long before Ramses III’s time, and in possession of Ramses II’s mortuary temple”); §162 (“the 971 Meshwesh slaves who kept this herd were a gift of Ramses III”); §163 (“we have here an inventory of the whole estate”; “the bulk of his alleged donations to the gods were old and traditional possessions”). 10. Donations and the royal coffers: Jenny Cromwell, “The First Recorded Strike in History,” Papyrus Stories, March 15, 2022: “Such redistribution of wealth had a detrimental effect on the royal coffers and as a result on the individuals paid from those resources.” 11. The Berlin ostracon: O. Berlin P. 10633, in Cromwell’s translation: “Year 29, second month of akhet, day 21. On this day, the scribe Amennakht announced to the crew, saying: ‘Twenty days have passed in the month, and rations have not been given to us!’ He went to the temple of Djeserkheperre-Meryamun (Horemheb) in the estate of Amun. 46 bushels of emmer were brought and was given to them on the second month of akhet, day 23.” “Bushels” is the translator’s word; the text here says “forty-six measures” and does not convert. 12. The Turin Strike Papyrus (Cat. 1880), in P. J. Frandsen’s translation (1990), as reproduced on libcom.org: year 29, second month of the Growing season (peret), day 10: “the crew passed the five guard-posts of the tomb saying: ‘We are hungry, for 18 days have already elapsed in this month;’ and they sat down at the rear of the temple of Menkheperre”; day 12: “The prospect of hunger and thirst has driven us to this; there is no clothing, there is no ointment, there is no fish, there are no vegetables. Send to Pharaoh, our good lord, about it, and send to the vizier, our superior, that we may be supplied with provisions.” “The ration of the 1st month of winter was issued to them on this day.” The vizier To: “am I the vizier who was promoted (recently) for the purpose of taking away? ... it so happens that there is nothing in the granaries – but I shall give you what I have found.” The scribe Hori: “There is given to you a half-ration.” First month of the Harvest season, day 13, behind the temple of Merenptah, the mayor promises “these 50 sacks of emmer for provisions until Pharaoh gives you (a) ration.” The accuser Penanuke: “he took away an ox branded with the brand of the temple of Wesermaatre-setepenre, and it is standing in his stable” (Frandsen identifies the temple as that of Ramesses II). Authorship: Museo Egizio, Cat. 1880: “The scribe Amennakht is the author of this papyrus.” 13. Storerooms of the “temples of millions of years”: Haring (see below): “in the Ramesside Period (1292-1070 BCE) it was their storerooms that often provided for the offerings at Karnak.” Granary capacity from the base text, Lecture 6, section 6.2: 226,328 sacks, 16,522,000 liters, enough for 3,400 families for a year. 14. Beef, ox heads, shutiu and gold: base text, Lecture 5, section 5.2 (nine portions of beef and eleven ox heads; the term swtjw; Boulaq 11 recto, page 3, line 6, on the trader who paid two units of gold). Sheribin: Vocabulaire de l’Égyptien Ancien (VÉgA), Papyrus Boulaq 11 (Cairo CG 58070), recto 2, 5–8, French translation: “Même jour ce qui a été donné au marchand Cheribin : 3 cuisses, 2 têtes, 2 morceaux-semes, 2 morceaux-hérétj, 1 pièce-âqa, ce qui fait 1 châty d’or”; the entry dates the papyrus to the Eighteenth Dynasty. 15. Silver from sales: Breasted, table “Temple Incomes for Thirty-One Years,” p. 99: “Silver received in Exchange for Objects of Impost Sold by the Temples,” Thebes “3,606 d., 1 k. or 878.987 lb.” (troy pounds, about 328 kg). In §169 he warns that this income list probably does not show the temples’ entire income. 16. P. BM 10401: Jac. J. Janssen, “Requisitions from Upper Egyptian Temples (P. BM 10401),” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 77 (1991): 79–94, from the abstract (full text not seen): “It lists metals, garments, cattle, vegetable and other commodities collected from temples and priests between Elephantine and Esna by the ‘Chief Taxing-Master’. Although it is not clear where the goods were taken, nor what they represent, various possibilities are considered.” 17. The Karnak reward scene: Breasted, §§492–97, year 10, third month of the Inundation season, day 19; the king: “Give many favors and numerous rewards of fine gold, silver, and myriads of all good things, to the High Priest of Amon-Re, king of gods, Amenhotep, triumphant, because of the many excellent monuments which he has made in the house of Amon-Re.” Helck’s reading, as quoted by Haring: “the inu, tep-djeret, and the provision of Amonrasonter, which you have caused to be brought to Pharaoh, your lord, (being) what a good and useful servant does for Pharaoh, his lord.” Weights: Haring, n. 7, nearly 2 kg of gold and 1 kg of silver at 91 g to the deben; on Graefe’s 13.1 g deben for precious metals, about 131 g of gold. 18. The Hammamat stela: Breasted, §§461–68, “Year 3, second month of the third season, day 27”; the list includes “People of the infantry 5,000 men,” “People of the ‘crown possessions’ of the house of Pharaoh 2,000 men,” “Quarrymen and stonecutters 130 men,” “Draughtsmen 2 men,” “Sculptors 4 men,” “The dead who are excluded from this list 900,” “Total 8,368”; “ten carts, there being six yoke of oxen to (each) cart”; a quarry chief who was “overseer of herds of ‘The-House-of-Usermare-Meriamon,’” with Breasted’s note “the herd is mentioned in Papyrus Harris, 10, 7.” Breasted calculates the correct total as 8,362. 19. Galena and gold: Haring: “Some papyri indicate that Amenhotep’s predecessor Ramessesnakht kept an eye on expeditions searching for galena, the raw material for eyepaint, in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and saw to it that material collected there reached the royal residence.” The base text says that Amenhotep’s predecessor organized the galena expedition and that Amenhotep sent the pigment to the palace. 20. Assmann: base text, section 5.2, retold. Haring: “Whereas older Egyptological literature stresses the idea of the temples as economic competitors, even threats, to the government, recent studies emphasize their integrative role.” 21. The High Priest as tall as the king: Breasted, §492: “the High Priest is here represented with the same heroic figure as the king. The high priests are gradually rising to equal the power and state of the Pharaoh”; §493: “so tall that the two officials are able to reach but a short way above his waist.” 22. The king’s last words: Breasted, §410: “I planted the whole land with trees and verdure, and I made the people dwell in their shade. I made the woman of Egypt to go [—] to the place she desired, (for) no stranger nor any one upon the road molested her. I made the infantry and chariotry to dwell (at home) in my time ... Their bows and their weapons reposed in their magazines ... I sustained alive the whole land, whether foreigners, (common) folk, citizens, or people, male or female”; §411: “Behold, I have gone to rest in the Nether World ... Amon-Re has established my son on my throne”; §412: “Be ye attached to his sandals, kiss the earth in his presence ... drag for him monuments, dig for him canals ... that ye may enjoy his favor, in possession of his provision every day.” 23. Discovery and acquisition: Breasted, §151 n. b: “Found by the natives at Thebes in 1855. It lay with four other rolls in a hole in the floor of a common cliff-tomb near Der el-Medineh, beneath a pile of mummies which filled the tomb. Together with some twenty other rolls ... it was offered for sale to Mr. A. C. Harris, of Alexandria, who purchased it.” British Museum collection page EA9999,2: “Acquisition name: Purchased from: Miss Selima Harris”; “Previous owner/ex-collection: Anthony Charles Harris”; registration number 1872,1101.1.2 (the first four digits give the year of registration, 1872).

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base text: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization, authorized electronic manuscript, Lecture 5, section 5.2, “The Economic Role of the Temples,” read in full on November 2, 2026; also one sentence each from section 6.2 (the granary capacity of the Ramesseum) and section 10.3 (eighty thousand at Karnak). Retold from the base text: temples as places of worship and as economic entities built into the state’s administration and finances; Assmann’s view that a conflict between church and state was unthinkable in Egypt and that the king was high priest of all the gods; the religious motives for Akhenaten’s move to Amarna; the majority view that temples were not the king’s economic rivals; the Deir el-Medina ostracon with nine portions of beef and eleven ox heads; taxation of temples in P. BM 10401; the reward of Amenhotep at Karnak; his predecessor’s galena expedition; temple income from sponsors, booty and the sale of surplus offerings; the shutiu of Papyrus Boulaq 11 and Cairo 58081 and the two units of gold.

2. Additional sources (all read on November 2, 2026): (1) Great Harris Papyrus: J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. IV (Chicago, 1906), §§151–412, from the archive.org full text (ancient-records-of-egypt-volume-4); British Museum collection page EA9999,2 (read directly on November 2, 2026). (2) Hawass et al., “Revisiting the harem conspiracy and death of Ramesses III,” BMJ 345 (2012): e8268, abstract only (Europe PMC); full text not seen. (3) Museo Egizio papyrus collection pages for Cat. 1875 (Judicial Papyrus) and Cat. 1880 (Strike Papyrus). (4) The Strike Papyrus in P. J. Frandsen’s translation (“Editing Reality: The Turin Strike Papyrus,” 1990) as reproduced on libcom.org; O. Berlin P. 10633 and the course of the strike also from Jenny Cromwell, Papyrus Stories (2022); Edgerton 1951 and the original were not consulted. (5) B. Haring, “Ramesside Temples and the Economic Interests of the State,” IBAES 7 (full PDF). (6) Janssen 1991 (JEA 77), abstract only; full text not seen. (7) The VÉgA entry for Papyrus Boulaq 11, and the Zurich dissertation Festvorbereitungen (doi:10.5167/uzh-152477), seen only in search snippets, not read in full; the points taken from it are to be verified (from search snippets). (8) E. F. Wente and C. C. Van Siclen III, “A Chronology of the New Kingdom,” in Studies in Honor of George R. Hughes (SAOC 39, Chicago, 1976), ISAC open-access PDF, Table 1 on p. 218 and p. 235 read. Coordinates are from Wikidata.

3. Places and times: Medinet Habu (25.7200, 32.6008, site), around 1151 BCE, the death of Ramesses III and the compiling of the ledger; the temple of Ramesses II (25.7278, 32.6106, site), around 1154 BCE, the strike of year 29; Karnak (25.7183, 32.6583, site), around 1117 BCE, the reward of year 10 of Ramesses IX; Wadi Hammamat (25.9820, 33.5644, region), around 1148 BCE, the quarrying expedition of year 3 of Ramesses IV; Deir el-Medina (25.7283, 32.6014, site), 1855, the discovery of the ledger. The reign of Ramesses III follows Wente and Van Siclen 1976, Table 1, p. 218: March 1182 to April 1151 BCE; map years are converted from it (year 29 about 1154 BCE, year 3 of Ramesses IV about 1148 BCE, and year 10 of Ramesses IX about 1117 BCE, from the same table’s accession of Ramesses IX in June 1126 BCE). The British Museum page EA9999,2 gives 1184–1153 BCE; since chronologies differ by a few years, all map dates are marked “around.”

4. Boundaries and tensions: (1) Breasted held that the date at the head of the ledger (year 32, third month of the Harvest season, day 6) was the day of the king’s death; the 1976 chronology of Wente and Van Siclen (SAOC 39, p. 235) puts the death on day 15 of the same month, nine days later. Both are given without a ruling. (2) Breasted says the ledger was made to be placed in the royal tomb, but it actually came from a cache in a cliff tomb near Deir el-Medina (Breasted, §151 n. b). The text says only “in his view.” (3) Old and new property cannot be separated in the ledger. Breasted thought most of it was old property, while Cromwell says the donations drained the royal coffers; both readings are given. (4) Month of the strike: Frandsen and Cromwell give the second month of peret (the Growing season); the English page of the Turin museum says “second month of the Inundation.” The text follows the former. (5) Why Amenhotep was rewarded: Breasted read the passage as transferring to the High Priest dues formerly paid to the palace; Helck and Haring read it as praising him for sending Amun’s income to Pharaoh, which is also the base text’s reading. The weight of the gold and silver depends on the conversion used. (6) The base text says that the High Priest of Amun’s quarrying expedition is mentioned in the Wilbour Papyrus; this story instead uses the Hammamat stela as translated by Breasted, and whether the two refer to the same event has not been checked. (7) Papyrus Boulaq 11 belongs to the Eighteenth Dynasty. The base text places its dates in the Valley Festival; according to search snippets of the Zurich dissertation, it places the relevant dates in the Opet Festival, notes that neither the issuing office nor the recipients are named, suggests that the shutiu may have been agents acting for an institution such as a temple, and leaves open whether the entries record sales or deliveries (all to be verified, from search snippets; the full text was not read). The text names no festival and marks this with “as Jin Shoufu describes them.” (8) The records do not say why the workmen sat down at temples. The text states only that the temples had storerooms and that the scribe had once fetched grain from a temple; it supplies no motive. (9) No dialogue, thoughts or scene details are invented. Ancient texts are retold in modern prose from English and French translations, and their wording is given in the notes.