Their overseers followed them; the police commissioners of the locality, the Mazaiu, and the scribes mingled with them and addressed themselves to some of the leaders with whom they might be acquainted.  But these would not at first give them a hearing.  “We will not return,” they would say to the peacemakers; “make it clear to your superiors down below there.”  It must have been manifest that from their point of view their complaints were well founded, and the official, who afterwards gave an account of the affair to the authorities, was persuaded of this.  “We went to hear them, and they spoke true words to us.”  For the most part these strikes had no other consequence than a prolonged stoppage of work, until the distribution of rations at the beginning of the next month gave the malcontents courage to return to their tasks.  Attempts were made to prevent the recurrence of these troubles by changing the method and time of payments.  These were reduced to an interval of fifteen days, and at length, indeed, to one of eight.  The result was very much the same as before:  the workman, paid more frequently, did not on that account become more prudent, and the hours of labour lost did not decrease.  The individual man, if he had had nobody to consider but himself, might have put up with the hardships of his situation, but there were almost always wife and children or sisters concerned, who clamoured for bread in their hunger, and all the while the storehouses of the temples or those of the state close by were filled to overflowing with durrah, barley, and wheat.*

     * Khonsu, for example, excites his comrades to pillage the
     storehouses of the gate.

The temptation to break open the doors and to help themselves in the present necessity must have been keenly felt.  Some bold spirits among the strikers, having set out together, scaled the two or three boundary walls by which the granaries were protected, but having reached this position their hearts, failed them, and they contented themselves with sending to the chief custodian an eloquent pleader, to lay before him their very humble request:  “We are come, urged by famine, urged by thirst, having no more linen, no more oil, no more fish, no more vegetables.  Send to Pharaoh, our master, send to the king, our lord, that he may provide us with the necessaries of life.”  If one of them, with less self-restraint, was so carried away as to let drop an oath, which was a capital offence, saying, “By Amon! by the sovereign, whose anger is death!” if he asked to be taken before a magistrate in order that he might reiterate there his complaint, the others interceded for him, and begged that he might escape the punishment fixed by the law for blasphemy; the scribe, good fellow as he was, closed his ears to the oath, and, if it were in his power, made a beginning of satisfying their demands by drawing upon the excess of past months to such an extent as would pacify them for some days, and by paying them a supplemental wage in the name of the Pharaoh.  They cried out loudly:  “Shall there not be served out to us corn in excess of that which has been distributed to us; if not we will not stir from this spot?”