So if it’s clear from the texts that the robbers were in the majority not from Deir el Medina, where did that misconception/myth come from?
The most famous papyrus on this is P.Leopold II Amherst, which contains a very detailed deposition of one man called Amunpanefer. In it he talks about robbing the tomb of 17th Dynasty king Sobekemsaf and his wife, by boring holes into walls, smashing furniture, and setting mummies alight to collect the jewels that were beneath the bandages. He lists his conspirators and they’re draughtsmen, stonemasons, painters or some other kind of workmen. The type of people that would live at Deir el Medina, which was a village of expert craftsmen who worked on the tombs. Couple this with the prevailing idea that the VotK was a secret place that only the workers at DeM knew about, and you get a recipe for a little misinformation.
You see, nowhere in P.Leopold II Amherst does it actually say directly where these men are from, you have to infer it from what they tell us. In most cases, they state what their jobs are and how they robbed the tomb. Amunpanefer gives his job as 'Quarryman of the Temple of Amun,' which really should be a huge indication to anyone that he's not from DeM. It's him basically saying 'I work at the temple of Karnak' and anyone looking at it should know DeM and Karnak temple are not the same place. Nevertheless, most people's cursory glance at the texts will see Stonemasons and Draughtsmen, see robbing of the Valley of the Kings, remember that the Egyptians sought to keep the VotK secret to avoid robbery, built the secret DeM to house workers to work on the VotK, only workers at DeM knew where the VotK was, and automatically assume that the DeM workers were responsible for the robberies. In practice, however, things are different.
In early Egyptology we still hadn't translated a lot of texts, we're a baby discipline only 198 years from the decipherment of Hieroglyphs, and thus our cultural understanding of Egypt in 1920 is much less than our understanding of it in 2021. So when the tomb robbery papyri, or mostly P.Leopold II Amherst, was translated, people saw what they believed to be workers of DeM robbing the tombs based solely on the first few jobs seen in P.Leopold II Amherst. However, now we've translated more material, we understand that the village of Deir el Medina was not secret, nor was the VotK. We have evidence of workers from DeM getting passes to go out to Thebes to see family, and for family to visit them. So DeM and the VotK's location weren't secret, just more guarded than previous royal burial sites. That means anyone in the Theban area would know where it was and could attempt to rob it with a little insider information. You look further into Amunpanefer's deposition in P.Leopold II Amherst (jfc I'm getting thesis war flashbacks from typing that name so much), and he's listing Stonemasons and Quarrymen, sure, but this doesn't mean they work at DeM. There are other building projects these men could work on, like the ever expanding Karnak temple, or other government buildings. The Votk had it's own force who would be referred to as 'Draughtsman of the Place of Truth' or 'Draughtsman of the Village' as st mAat (place of Truth) and pA dmi (the Village) are the Egyptian names for DeM. They certainly wouldn't say 'I work for the temple of Amun'. He even goes on to list Fieldworkers (i.e. farmers), and a Boatman who worked for the Vizier. Oh gee guys I wonder how they got across the Nile. No they're totally DeM workers who just happened to cross the Nile and back again with the loot. Not people of Thebes at all. ahem
So, what this boils down to is early Egyptologists, lacking full cultural background, saw the contents of P.Leopold II Amherst, and based on their current working of 'the VotK is secret and so is the village of workmen, and these men are specialised workmen so they must be from DeM' they came to the conclusion of 'only the workmen of that village could have known where the tombs are and therefore they were the ones who robbed them'. It's a fair assumption for the time. Though there really are key clues in there that should have alerted them to something i.e. we used a Boatman and also we work for the Temple of Amun. So this information gets written down in books repeatedly. Peet translates the other tomb robbery papyri in 1920 and 1930. He makes no mention of them being from Deir el Medina, but because the idea is already in people's heads it just sticks. Thus, when later Egyptologists looking for information on the robberies find the older works, they see the same information and repeat it. This helps to continue the cycle. It doesn't help that because the translations are 'done' and they're not a set of literary texts, people just see the work on them as 'finished', unless you're super into them and work on a retranslation. So no one is looking at them, and just repeating the same misunderstanding from 100 years ago.
This is something that happens occasionally with academia, I feel particularly within the field of History, but I know it's also happened in STEM too. It's what we refer to as 'circular citation', wherein someone makes an assumption, writes it down in an article, and then everyone else just repeats that assumption in their articles without investigation because the original article was done by someone who Knows Stuff and eventually where that information came from is just sorta....lost. So when later scholars start to doubt the assumption because the data doesn't match, they're met with a lot of people just cross citing each other, but no actual concrete evidence of this assumption being correct. Everyone just blindly assumed it was true, because they didn't go back and check the evidence of the original claim. It's almost always 'some dude in the late 19th century had A Thought, and no one bothered to check he was right' and it can account for some huge errors in early work. This is why History is an ever evolving field. We're always going back to check on previous scholarship, or take a new angle on something, which is usually where you find the PhD students. And those PhD students are crying into their research because it appears no one else did the research on this and everything you thought you knew is wrong and it hurts...
So, yeah. It's early scholarship, not updated, and repeated ad nauseum, thus the idea gets stuck in people's minds.
