You are one of the gang that cuts and paints the royal tombs. You work an eight-day week, sleep in a hut above the Valley, and are paid in grain, fish, and beer. Your copper tools belong to the state and are counted every night.

You keep the gang's records on flakes of stone: who worked, who was sick, what was issued. Literacy is power, and you trade in it — writing letters, reading omens, and lending grain at quiet interest.

You serve one month in four at the great temple of Amun — purified, shaven, and clothed in white linen. The rest of the year you live as other men. The temple owns more land, grain, and cattle than the rest of Egypt put together.

You are nebet per — mistress of a craftsman's house. While the men are away at the tomb for eight days, the village is yours: grinding, baking, brewing, weaving, trading at the door, and keeping the ancestors fed.

You serve in the army of Usermaatre Ramesses. You have seen the Hittite chariots and the river run red. Now there is peace with Hatti, and mostly you guard grain, escort quarry crews, and wait.

You work land you do not own, for a temple that does. You plant when the flood pulls back, harvest before the scribes come to measure your grain, and pray the inundation is neither too low nor too high.