Inventory number

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A Chief Draughtsman’s Private Business Accounts

A chief draughtsman at Deir el-Medina kept this sheet as a notebook for private commissions during the first year of Ramesses IX — almost certainly Amenhotep son of Amennakht, who decorated the king's tomb. He wrote on papyrus already inscribed, scraping the old text away as he went; traces of it survive, including a few lines of what looks like an unknown literary text, perhaps in Middle Egyptian.

His entries record side work and what he was paid. Five days decorating a private house brought 14 loaves, counted day by day. A coffin brought 13 loaves and a sack and a half of barley. The largest job was paintwork on the vizier's boat, with a crew of three draughtsmen, paid in pigment — fine blue, ochre, resin, green — supplied partly by the customer and partly by the scribe of the mat Hori. Three days later the crew went to Thebes to report on rations and came back with tunics, yarn and lead from the vizier. The remaining notes are short food lists. His hand is small and untidy, and the article treats several of his errors as genuine scribal slips rather than emending silently.

What makes the sheet valuable is that it is dated to a traceable regnal year, and that the pen is the craftsman's own: bread owed and received, pigment measured in deben, a working man's week rather than an institution's ledger.