The first recorded strike took place in Egypt around 1170 BC. Royal tomb builders downed tools over late wheat rations — 'We are hungry!' The authorities heard them out, and work resumed the next day.
The event
More amazing facts
- 1274 BC · 1945 Fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, Egypt and the Hittites signed one of the oldest known peace treaties.
- 1250 BC · 1976 Ramesses II's mummy was never issued a passport — that's a myth.
- 1250 BC · 1899 China's oldest writing was ground up and swallowed as medicine.
- 1200 BC · 1936 The thylacine vanished from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, yet survived in Tasmania into the 20th century: the last one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.
- 1200 BC · 900 BC The Olmecs moved stone heads weighing tens of tonnes more than 150 km, and nobody knows quite how. These basalt portraits of rulers, up to 3.4 m tall, wear helmets, perhaps for war or the ballgame.
- 1200 BC · 1175 BC As the Bronze Age crumbled around the Mediterranean, Mesoamerica's first civilisation was rising: Olmec San Lorenzo flourished from about 1200 BC, while Egypt barely held off the Sea Peoples around 1175 BC.