Between 3,000 and 3,500 years ago, a village on the west bank of the Nile became the center of one of the world’s oddest and most macabre industries. The place known today as Deir el-Medina (the ancient Egyptians prosaically called it Pa-demi, or "the town") was the home of craftsmen who built and decorated tombs for the Pharaohs and favored members of the Egyptian ruling class. In a society that was obsessed with death and what comes after, the tomb builders were entrusted with a task of great importance — creating luxurious crypts where their rulers could continue to enjoy their privileged existence as they journeyed into the afterlife. The tomb builders also were charged with making those burial places secure from grave robbers, who coveted the jewels, gold and artifacts that the Pharaohs took with them in death. The village’s 70 houses were surrounded by a 20-foot-high mud-brick wall and guarded by a cadre of special guards, the Medjay, whose job apparently was to ensure that the details of the royal preparation for the afterlife remained secret.

But that effort ultimately came to naught. Unlike most of the population of ancient Egypt, most of the village’s men learned to read and write in Egyptian hieroglyphics, so that they could understand tomb plans and the inscriptions they made on the walls. They wrote legal documents, receipts, letters and love poems, some on sheets of papyrus and others on stray shards of limestone that the Egyptians used as the equivalent of scrap paper. ("Set your heart very firmly on writing, a useful profession for the one who does it," wrote one tutor to a pupil. "Your father had hieroglyphs, and he was honored in the streets.") Nearly 30 centuries later, those fragments were found by archaeologists, who used them to piece together the life of the village in intimate detail — everything from how the inventory of copper chisels fluctuated during a tomb project, to labor disputes and one craftsman’s work absences due to marital difficulties.