In the third year of pharaoh Ramesses V, c. 1145 bc, an Egyptian woman called Naunakhte, who lived in the workers’ village of Deir el-Medina (Figure 12), went to her local court to explain her final will.1 It was her express wish to disinherit some of her eight surviving children, sons and daughters, because they had failed in their duty to care for her in her old age. In her words:

An elderly woman of around eighty years of age, Naunakhte would have given her statement orally in front of a panel of fourteen men, her fellow villagers, and probably her husband and grown up children too, where it was recorded for posterity by two scribes in a text that is now known as P. Ashmolean Museum 1945.97.3 This and three other papyri, along with other textual evidence, enable us to learn something of her and her family’s lives and of the society of the village she lived in.