The main material of the study is the texts I know best from my previous research. During the New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1550–1069 BC), the tomb builders of the Valley of the Kings lived with their families in the nearby village of Deir el-Medina. Tens of thousands of texts have survived from the village, forming a source of information about the life of ancient Egyptian human communities that is also unique in other times of Egyptian history. The texts from the village are a diverse selection of personal and administrative texts. The villagers wrote letters, kept receipts and so on. The tomb builders worked under the vizier, Pharaoh’s right hand, being accountable to him, and the community scribes kept records of all sorts of matters related to tomb construction, such as supplies and the progress of the work. To start producing machine-readable texts for Egyptologists, I primarily use the texts that served as the material for my dissertation on feasts celebrated in village, including a lot of texts stating and implicating whether the tomb-builders were working on a specific date or not.
The remains of the village of Deir el-Medina, Thebes (mod. Luxor)