5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER
2 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS SON
1 EMBALMING HORMOSE
1 EMBALMING HIS BROTHER
1 MOURNING HIS SON
3 LIBATING TO HIS FATHER
13
and I suspect most of these:
8 WITH THE SCRIBE
1 OFF ABSENT WITH THE SCRIBE
5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE
2 FETCHING STONE FOR QENHERKHEPSHEF
1 LIBATING FOR HIS SON
1 LIBATING FOR HIM
1 LIBATING
2 BURYING THE GOD
21
and there's a bunch making remedies and/or looking after wives and female relatives:
6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE
5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING
4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES
4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING
2 HIS MOTHER WAS ILL
21
Some ones that seem work-related by the use of names:
49 WITH HIS BOSS
3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO
3 WITH HOREMWIA
13 WITH AAPEHTI
68
Then there's some actual stuff the worker was doing - mostly brewing beer:
17 BREWING BEER
5 OFFERING TO THE GOD
1 WITH HIS GOD
1 STRENGTHENING THE DOOR
1 BUILDING HIS HOUSE
25
A few unknowns:
4 OFF ABSENT
And finally the actual illness and injury, including scorpion guy!
67 ILL
4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE
1 THE SCORPION BIT HIM
72
Seems that brewing and DIY were the only hobbies around - unless you count making remedies or embalming!
While definitely a legal grey area in these modern times, foremen borrowing a truck/excavator and a bloke or two to sort out something at the foreman's house still seems to happen.
Remember this is translated by archaeologists, and most of them go into the profession thinking about mummies.
I suspect whenever they come across a symbol they don't understand to translate, they might just assume it means "ooh, it must mean wrapping my father"!
No. We have a good grasp of how ancient Egypt worked. Archeologists also don't go into the profession "thinking about mummies", archeology is a respectable, evidence-based profession. Do you think the whole field of archeology is a joke?0 There are lots of dual-language pieces that have been used to verify an accurate translation of these very inscriptions.
Maybe they, like in some Abrahamic religions to come later, considered women "impure" when they had the period, and this somehow translated to the men in the household? Wild speculation, of course.
It's really anti-worker to consider reasons to miss work (legit ones, allowed ones, necessary ones) "excuses". As if everyone's supposed to work all the time and any time off is non-legit.
What a poor way to view workers... the article really is casting workers in a bad light when that's the opposite of what we need.
Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year.
Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?
"Sekki is the traditional way of expressing seasons in Japan. There are 24 sekki, including rikka (立夏, the first day of summer) in early May, shoman (小満, lit. “a little full” as in growing, waxing) in late May and boshu (芒種, lit. bearded grain) in early June.
The 24 sekki can be further divided into three for a total of 72 shijijūni ko (七十二侯) that last for about five days each. These subseasons include mugi no toki itaru (麦秋至), or “the time for wheat has come,” which lasts from May 31 to June 5, and kamakiri shozu (“the mantis is born”) from June 6 to June 10. "
There used to be a maintained shared Google Calendar you could use that would display those in your agenda. While the names did not fit exactly with my local weather, it was interesting to give a name to small parts of the year. It felt very natural and intuitive.
I love this. Ever since moving back into the wild from the city, it's been so nice to take notice of all the little "microseasons" you'll see inside a usual season. I took it for granted as a kid, but as an adult, it's nice to name and partake in the various parts of the year as you mention.
It's common among many ancient cultures to treat equinoxes and solstices as events of great importance, as those mark the beginning of the season change, but not all regions experience seasons the same.
Ancient Egyptians, while knowledgeable of astronomy, had only three seasons: Akhet (summer/heat), Peret (flooding, of the Nile) and Shemu (harvest). Notice the conspicuous absence of winter.
The roman calendar started the year in spring as well with March (hence the names September/October/November/December are literally the 7th/8th/9th/10th month). The Greek apparently were all over the place with the year starting in summer/fall/winter depending on region/polis.
One origin story for April Fool's suggests that it's to do with getting the year wrong.
My understanding was that new years was always January, 1st, but that the year number changed on Lady Day
The UK's tax year still reflects this, starting from April 6, which both accounts (pun intended) for the year changing on Lady Day, and the transition from Julian to Gregorian calendars.
I'd heard this was because July and August (for Julius and Augustus) were added later to the calendar and originally there were only 10 months that started with January.
I believe those were merely renamed, and the original year was 10 months from March to December, with a nondescript “winter” period between December and March.
“The ancient Egyptian calendar – a civil calendar – was a solar calendar with a 365-day year. The year consisted of three seasons of 120 days each, plus an intercalary month of five epagomenal days treated as outside of the year proper. Each season was divided into four months of 30 days.”
There were two in The Bay Area in the early 2000s: wet and dry. Prolonged drought has made us a one-season region, talking about four seasons like other areas.
The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.) - https://youtu.be/fD-R35DSSZY gets into the "why the year we have is designed the way it is" ... though it takes 22 minutes to get to that part.
It wasn't really better as the 30 * 12 + 5 approach needed manual application of the + 5... which is what the new calendar was trying to avoid.
Another phenomenon I’ve found curious is the cross-cultural definition of a week as roughly a quarter moon, and correlated names for days of the week. [1]
> I think the 7-day week is more of a statement about how effective the Judeo-Christian culture has imposed a modern week on the rest of the world.
The 7-day week originated in Sumerian Babylon culture from 2100 BC and has to do with quartering moon phases. I worry when seeing many things attributed to "Judeo-Christian culture" which actually originated from other cultures, many aspects of what's in "Judeo-Christian culture" including perhaps some of the key stories in the Old Testament like the Flood appear to have been copied or at least inspired by stories from Sumerian culture which was considered the 'high culture' of the region.
They definitely didn’t invent it, but I would say it’s fair to give Christianity itself credit for converting Rome to a 7 day week & then most of the rest of the world after. It takes a religion with certain characteristics to accomplish that.
> it’s fair to give Christianity itself credit for converting Rome to a 7 day week
How so? Constantinus was the one who committed to the change and the day names were after the Roman Gods. Even today, we're using Viking names, like today happens to be Odin's Day, tomorrow's going to be Thor's Day and the day after is going to be Freya's Day. I'm not sure it is reasonable or rational to "credit Christianity itself".
As far as I understand from the Wikipedia article, this practice has spread directly from Judaism (7 days) through Christianity through the Roman Empire (which renamed the days according to the planets/gods) to all of these places. It's not clear from the article if perhaps the Ancient Greeks had a similar system already - but otherwise, the Indians and the Chinese adopted this system from Roman/Hellenistic sources between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, and other cultures around them adopted it from them slightly later.
These are more jargon imports that came bundled with the 7-day week after the Romans, and then Europe, popularized it after adopting it. As an analogy, you don't hear many other ways of naming tea and coffee across cultures.
That's hilarious. I lived with a really cold winter and it's not only road maintenance. If you have to do some renovations at your place they sometimes also need to happen on "construction" season, even if it's inside a lot of construction workers go to other places in the winter.
And also not exclusive to Winterpeg. It's used in many other parts of Canada as well. Construction season alternatively being named "orange cone season" as well as the roads are full of them.
India (and nearby areas) famously used/uses 6 seasons. The Mayan Haab' isn't precisely a seasonal calendar, but each of the 20 'months' was used to much the same effect.
From my perspective, anything regularly
periodic in nature is used to track time: the Sun (years, seasons, days, day/dusk) and Moon (months, weeks, King tides). Consider even the starfield (astrology: years, decades+).
Four seasons makes sense in all of these contexts, and I hypothesize that there are a lot of patterns in nature that are well bucketed into 4 sequential, equal seasons. This is impossible for me to demonstrate, unfortunately. Also, division by by 4 and 12, a year into four seasons is like a month into four weeks. Weeks seem to me to be among our most subjective fundamental time unit.
I see weeks as being the most arbitrary. I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic.
I always wondered what it would feel like to not have weeks, or even years, but to live life in a continuous stream of days looking forward. I'm not sure if we would feel a horrible lack of closure or accomplishment, or if it would make us more productive and forward looking and moving. I wonder how much of my life I waste just trying to close out a week/month/year.
I was talking to a Jamaican primary school teacher once. She told me that the songs (Nursary rhymes) that they teach the kids are often based on old English ones ( like ring-ring-a-roses) but any reference to the four seasons have been mutated. Since in Jamaica they just have two seasons; wet season and dry season.
> I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic.
I especially like that you chose prime numbers. A week composed of a prime number of days will remain the smallest indivisible group of days that a culture will have.
Agreed, glad you called this out! I was thinking about rambling about this, but this is a topic I can go on and on about, and I was already off to a slow start today...
Please ramble! I've actually though much about this as well. It kind of forces a "holy day" because without one nothing fits into one week with any period other than "every day" or "every week" - be that week 5 or 7 or 11 days. I've heard that the seven day week was independently developed at least three times in ancient times across disparate cultures as well.
I can't think of an ancient Middle Eastern culture with 4 seasons. Hittites had 3, various Mesopotamian cultures had 2. It really only made sense in Europe to divide into 4.
Makuru was much more suitable than “winter” for the climate in Perth: time to rug up and settle in for cosy nights with your loved ones. I wish the Noongar seasons were more often used in the south west of Australia by everybody, so much more suitable than European seasons shifted 6 months!
I feel a connection to the guy who missed work "absent with the scribe". I know it was probably something important, but a scribe writing "that guy is excused, he was with me" makes me think of those times my boss took me for lunch and paid with the corporate card.
“… On month 3 of Akhet, days 21-4, it seems that Pennub was off work because he was looking after the ill Aapehti. The most frequently recorded reason for absence is illness (over a hundred times), including 'eye trouble', and 'the scorpion stung him'; the next most frequent is being away with one's superior doing private work for him, a practice that was not forbidden if done in moderation…”
Time off for illness! That's nice. I wonder if one of the HR scribes tracked the days every person took off in an analog ERP system. Scribes seemed important, maybe they outsourced the basics to contractors.
From the curator’s comments: “[The] next most frequent [reason for absence] is being away with one’s superior doing private work for him, a practice that was not forbidden if done in moderation.”
Linked both below the image and in the third paragraph of the post, but there aren't many more excuses, just a lot of repeats, and the article gives more context then the curators notes at that link.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634