The workman’s wages were at all events partly paid in kind. Herodotus tells us of the amount expended in provision for the workmen who built the Great Pyramid: “On the pyramid is shown an inscription, in Egyptian characters, how much was expended in radishes, onions, and garlic, for the workmen; which the interpreter, as I well remember, reading the inscription, told me amounted to one thousand six hundred talents of silver.” Payment was still in kind in the time of the New Empire. One of the foremen of the craftsmen of the Theban necropolis in the time of Ramses IX (1142–1123 B.C.), fortunately kept with great care a record of all that happened to his gang, noting whether the men were on full work or were “idle.” Festival days broke in considerably on their working time, as we hear of two full months’ holiday, and again of another month, in the same year; but the workmen’s rations ran on all the same whether they were working or not. The worry was that the rations were often behind time, and when that happened there was trouble. One month the rations were only one day late, but another they did not come at all, and then the workmen went on strike. This produced the supplies; but ere long the same thing happened again, and this time the gang went in a body to Thebes, and complained to the “great princes,” and the “chief prophets of Amen.” Again the result was good, and the journal of the careful foreman gives us a quaint hint of how it had been necessary to use a little palm-oil in the case of the influential “fan-bearer” to secure the desired end. “We received to-day our corn-rations; we gave two boxes and a writing-tablet to the fan-bearer.” We cannot be sure whether the condition of the necropolis workmen, who were mostly skilled craftsmen, metal workers, carvers, painters, and so forth, was worse than that of the workmen in the city of the living; probably the conditions in both cases were much the same. In any case, it is the necropolis workmen who supply us with our instances of insufficient or delayed payment, and who give us the first historic examples of strikes. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses III (1170 B.C.) things were pretty bad in the necropolis, and wages had not been paid for half a year. After giving the officials nine days’ grace, the workmen naturally went on strike in a body.