Iron shackles found in Ptolemaic gold mine

Iron shackles dating to the Early Ptolemaic period have been discovered in Ghozza, a 3rd century B.C. gold mine in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. These are the among the oldest shackles ever found in the Mediterranean, and are extremely rare finds in Egypt, especially directly associated with mining. They also provide new information about the miners at Ghozza having been a mixed group of free and forced laborers.

The Eastern Desert, the large stretch of the Sahara between the Nile and the Red Sea, was rich in coveted natural resources, including gold, copper, iron, gems and other hard stones. Gold was mined there for thousands of years, coming to a peak during the New Kingdom (ca. 1500–1000 B.C.) first, then reaching new heights during the Hellenistic era (332–30 B.C.). The Ptolemies opened almost 40 mines in the Eastern Desert and Ghozza was the northernmost of them, opened during the second half of the 3rd century B.C.

The workers at Ghozza lived in a designed village with residential blocks on streets, administrative buildings and baths. This was a starkly different setup than seen at other mines. The laborers at Samut North, one of the earliest mines opened by Ptolemy I in the 310s B.C., lived in guarded dormitories. The residences at Ghozza were not guarded and among the hundreds of ostraca (pottery fragments used as writing surfaces) found there are several that refer to wages paid to miners. The shackles are the first archaeological evidence that enslaved or forced laborers were employed at Ghozza alongside the wage-earning miners.

The shackles were found in an area on the eastern perimeter of the village known as Sector 44. The buildings in this sector appear to have been used for storage, food preparation and the repair of metal objects. Two sets of shackles were discovered in Sector 44. One set consists of seven foot-rings with two articulated links placed in a pit cut into a corridor floor. The second consists of four links and two ring fragments found with other iron objects scattered on a floor of a different room. They were indubitably used to shackle humans (animals were tied with ropes) by closing them around a person’s ankles.

The design of the shackles is very similar to ones discovered in the silver mines of Laurion, 30 miles or so south of Athens. They also resemble one of the only depictions of a shackled person in Greek art: a man with fettered ankles holding a bucket and a sponge, an image on the interior of an Attic black-figure kylix ca. 490-480 B.C. found in Naples, now in the Rijksmuseum can Oudheden.

The discovery of shackles at Ghozza reveals that at least part of the workforce was composed of forced labour. The exact living conditions of these individuals remain unclear because their dwelling places have not yet been identified, indeed the village set-up seems to suggest that the population was free to move around in general. More than half of the village has been excavated so far, and excavations will continue in the hope of identifying any containment areas.

In the meantime, the discovery of the shackles at Ghozza serves as a reminder of the harsh realities faced by workers in the Ptolemaic gold mines. Beneath the grandeur of Egypt’s wealth and the imposing mountains of the Eastern Desert lies a history of exploitation. The gold extracted from these mines helped finance the ambitions of Egypt’s rulers, but it came at a significant human cost.