The so called “Necropolis Journal” is a day-by-day record of Necropolis workmen at Thebes. Thus, the study of this kind of documents is important in understanding their administration.
In this paper I would like to focus upon one single typical text, the Papyrus Greg, which had long been unpublished, although it is well-known to the Egyptologist. Now, however, Prof. Kitchen's Ramesside Inscriptions contains a hieroglyphic transcription with a few textual notes. The document is now easily accessible. In these circumstances a comprehensive study of the Papyrus Greg (as well as the whole study of “Necropolis Journal”) has not yet appeared so far.
In this present discussion we deal with two points concerning this Papyrus and the “Necropolis Journal”; To what reign does the Papyrus Greg belong? Some scholars believe it was written in the reign of Ramesses III. We can read regnal year 5 to 7 in the Papyrus Greg but the king's name is missing. We take special notice of the “gap” in this papyrus. If this papyrus was written in the reign of Ramesses III, we must suppose that about 12 months' entries of the recto and 13 months' entries of the verso are missing and must suppose a divergency of a month in the entries of the same length gap (between recto and verso). After considering the contents, we arrived at the conclusion that we cannot assume the existence of the gap—there is no gap. And this papyrus belongs to the reign of Siptah/Tawsert. After discussing the dating of the Papyrus, we went on to investigate how to locate and understand the Papyrus Greg in the whole range of the “Necropolis Journal”.

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The workmen's village at Deir el-Medina, which was engaged in the quarrying and decoration of tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, has left a remarkable full record reflecting many aspects of Deir el-Medina workers' day to day employment. These are of particular interest for the light they shed on the system and nature of the work. Although the potential of these records is great, their evaluation is severely hampered by the fact that they are so fragmentary and difficult to interpret in any systematic fashion.
The available documents of this class, generally referred to today as the ‘Necropolis Journal’, are here gathered together and analysed. The nonliterary texts from Deir el-Medina may be shown to fall conveniently into one of two distinct categories: legal documents; and socio-economic documents. The socio-economic documents may themselves be subdivided into Turnus lists; absentee lists; provisions documentation; name lists and true journal texts.
From the style and content of the various documents it is possible to draw two principal conclusions:
1. Apart from true journal texts, the main body of the ‘Necropolis Journal’ consists of Turnus lists and absentee lists, which had originally been drawn up as separate memoranda.
2. From an analysis of the absentee lists and the ‘Necropolis Journal’ it appears that the Deir el-Medina workforce was reorganized in around the Year 24 of Ramesses III and again under Ramesses V. Similar reorganizations of the tomb workmen are to have taken place in the reign of Horemheb and, another is referred to in Papyrus Greg, as I have shown in a previous article.
From these facts we may suppose that the organization of the workmen was flexible, and altered as and when occasion demanded.

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