Men at Work. Gripping an adze in one hand, an unshaven carpenter shapes a wooden beam, in this fragment of a tomb painting. Thousands of paintings, letters, records and simple doodles by the artists and workers at Deir el-Medina have been discovered, making their village one of the best-documented communities of ancient times. Though the surviving documents shed little light on the major events of the period, they vividly capture the everyday life of the working class in ancient Egypt.