One Year as an Ancient Egyptian Farmer🌾🐫

What was life really like for an ancient Egyptian farmer? Spoiler: mostly mud. 🌾

Your year had just three seasons, and the Nile ran all of them: the flood (Akhet), the growing season (Peret) and the harvest (Shemu). While your fields were underwater, the state could draft you to haul stone. A high Nile meant a big harvest, and a bigger tax bill. You were paid in grain, bread and thick beer, and the bread was so gritty with sand that many mummies have worn-down teeth. One school text even jokes that worms ate half your crop, a hippo ate the rest, and the tax man came anyway. Heaven? An endless farm, so Egyptians were buried with shabti figures to do the work for them.

SOURCES
- The Egyptian calendar and seasons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar
- Flooding of the Nile and the Nilometer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooding_of_the_Nile ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilometer
- Labour drafts (corvée) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e
- The scribes' satire on farming: Papyrus Lansing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Lansing
- Bread and beer wages: British Museum - https://britishmuseum.org/blog/sip-history-ancient-egyptian-beer
- Worn teeth from gritty bread: British Dental Journal - https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2009.309/
- Tax defaulter tied to a post and beaten: relief in the mastaba of Mereruka, Saqqara -https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/egypt/saqqara/mereruka/mereruka.html
- Shabtis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushabti

MUSIC
"Ibn Al-Noor" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

#shorts #ancientegypt #history #egypt #historyfacts #nile #dailylife #facts