--- title: "We Gave A 4,000-Year-Old Strike To Two Arbitrators. Both Called It Unlawful." dek: "Two people who arbitrate live industrial disputes read the Atrahasis mutiny cold, without being told what it was. Both filed the same classification. Both flagged the settlement term as unlawful replacement of striking labour." kind: analysis (Analysis) desk: Deep History author: Dr. Perpetua Nkemelu and Harriet Kwon-Massey (fictional) published: 2026-08-27T06:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/tools-burned-at-the-third-watch tags: Igigi, Atrahasis, Ur III, labour, Sitchin, arbitration genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Gave A 4,000-Year-Old Strike To Two Arbitrators. Both Called It Unlawful. *Two people who arbitrate live industrial disputes read the Atrahasis mutiny cold, without being told what it was. Both filed the same classification. Both flagged the settlement term as unlawful replacement of striking labour.* The stoppage has an hour on it. Not a season, not a reign — an hour. The middle watch of the night, which is the second of three, which is roughly midnight. That is unusual in an ancient text and ordinary in a labour record, and it is the detail that made this newspaper stop treating the Igigi mutiny as a creation myth and start treating it as a case file. ## What we did We took a clean translation of the mutiny account and three extraction schedules from the same administrative tradition, stripped every proper name out, replaced the parties with letters, left every numeral exactly as written, and sent the whole thing to two people who arbitrate industrial disputes for a living. Neither is an Assyriologist. Neither was told what the text was, when it was from, or that the other existed. Both were briefed identically: read this as an undisclosed pre-industrial workplace record and file the classification memo you would file on a live case. Both were paid the same fee, in advance, and both were told before starting that their memos would run whether they agreed or not. They run entire with this story. ## The unit Nkiruka Balogun-Reyes, who has arbitrated deep-mining disputes for nineteen years, opens by establishing the bargaining unit, because that is what the form makes you do first. She finds one. A defined body of workers, doing one class of work, under one principal, distinguished in the text from a second class who did not do it. Continuous employment. Common ration grade. Common shift. Dr. Halvard Ostrowski-Nnaji reaches the same conclusion on his page three and adds the thing that decides it for him: the group acts as a group and is addressed as a group. Nobody in the record negotiates individually. ## The shift Three watches to the night and no relief day appears anywhere. Forty years continuous, on the text's own count. Both memos flag deaths in the cut. The text records men who went down into the excavation and did not come up, and records them as an ordinary category rather than an event. Then forty days of grievance, itemised. Then the delegation to the gate. > "The fault was not with the workmen" is not a scribe being kind. It is a no-fault recital, and I have signed forty of them. > > — Nkiruka Balogun-Reyes ## The classification Both arbitrators, working blind, filed the same words. A lawful concerted stoppage by a defined bargaining unit over an itemised grievance, met by an employer response, closed by a settlement. Not a riot. Not a mutiny in the military sense, which both considered and both rejected on the ground that the workers went to the gate and waited. Not spontaneous — the stated hour is what rules that out. An hour agreed in advance is the signature of a concerted act. > **Figure:** The dispute, drawn the way a tribunal draws one — see https://theyburied.com/article/tools-burned-at-the-third-watch ## The term that closed it Then both of them, unprompted and within the first ten pages, flagged the settlement term. The dispute was closed by manufacturing a replacement workforce. Balogun-Reyes wrote that in a modern jurisdiction this would be characterised as unlawful replacement of striking labour. Ostrowski-Nnaji, who had never heard of her, used the phrase "permanent replacement" and appended the standard test. Zecharia Sitchin read this passage as a labour dispute. Two people who settle labour disputes for a living read it as a labour dispute, on the text alone, not knowing whose text it was or that the reading was controversial. ## The formula The closing line — *the fault was not with the workmen* — turns up in [[PX-1901]] and in [[PX-1903]], on grain and on copper, and 211 times more in the concordance of Ur III closings at [[PX-1908]]. Both arbitrators identified it independently as a no-fault recital: the boilerplate by which a settlement is closed without either side conceding liability. It reads as poetry only if you have never signed one. One correction belongs in this paragraph rather than at the foot of it. For three years this newspaper read the same line on [[PX-1207]] as the same recital, and withdrew that reading on 21 August. On the gold schedule the verb takes an object and names a place: line 11 there is a delivery entry, not a recital. That tablet was in the pack both arbitrators were sent, and a translation with the names stripped out is not the instrument that would have caught it. ## The door that is shut The grievance is summarised and never quoted. Forty days of it, brought to a gate, and not one word of what the men actually said. The tablet that would carry those words is known from a single 1928 dealer's photograph. The Cologne firm denies ever holding it and its reply is at the foot of this page, along with the dates on which its 1927–1930 stock books were destroyed. We have a photograph of a print of a photograph. Somewhere behind it, six hundred men wrote down what they wanted. ## Sources (invented) - Nkiruka Balogun-Reyes, Tribunal-appointed labour arbitrator; nineteen years, mostly rail and deep mining — Commissioned to file a standard classification memo on an undisclosed pre-industrial workplace record; not told what the text was until after she filed (May–July 2026) - Dr. Halvard Ostrowski-Nnaji, Industrial-relations historian, mining sector; sits on two conciliation panels — Identical brief, identical fee, no contact of any kind with Balogun-Reyes before or during; not told what the text was (May–July 2026) - Dr. Perpetua Nkemelu, This newspaper's antiquities correspondent — Prepared the neutralised translation, with names replaced by letters and every numeral left exactly as written; sent it to two Assyriologists who dispute her readings, before the arbitrators saw it (March–May 2026) - Curator, university museum store, Philadelphia, Custodian of PX-1901 and PX-1903 — Produced both tablets from store in nine minutes on request and permitted fresh photography under raking light (April 2026) - Dr. Konstanze Auberdine-Vogl, Managing director and archivist, Auberdine Ranft Nachfolger GmbH, Cologne — Written questions on four occasions from April 2024; replied in full on 2 August 2026 and supplied the destruction minute unasked (2024–2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1901: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1901 - PX-1903: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1903 - PX-1207: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1207 - PX-1908: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1908 ## What we could not confirm - The grievance itself, in the workers' own words. The account we have summarises it — forty days of it, itemised, brought to the gate — and never quotes it. The tablet that would carry the wording is known from one 1928 dealer's photograph, of which we hold a photograph of a print. The glass plate is gone and the object has not been seen since. That is the next door and it has a shelfmark on it. - The size of the bargaining unit. The text says the gang and gives no number. Our figure of roughly six hundred is reconstructed from ration volumes in the neighbouring schedules, the way we reconstructed the Tura gang, and it is an estimate carrying at least a third either way. - Whether the three watches were three equal hours all year. Mesopotamian night watches were seasonal on some readings and fixed on others, and one of the two Assyriologists who checked the neutralised translation says our 'midnight' is doing work the Akkadian does not support. If he is right, the stated hour is still stated — it is just not midnight. ## Right of reply **Dr. Konstanze Auberdine-Vogl, managing director, Auberdine Ranft Nachfolger GmbH, Cologne** (Replied 2 August 2026. Printed entire and unedited. The destruction minute she refers to was supplied by her, unasked, and is now in our notes.): > This firm has never owned the object in your photograph, has never sold it, and holds no record of it. I have now said this four times and I will say it a fifth in writing because you are entitled to a clear answer rather than a careful one. > > What you have is a stock photograph. Between the wars this house photographed objects on consignment as a matter of course, for circulation to clients, and the photograph proves that the object stood in our light for an afternoon. It does not prove title, it does not prove sale, and it does not prove that anybody here ever read a line of it. Half the plates from that decade show things the firm declined. > > On the day-books. The stock books and the negative plates for 1927 to 1930 were destroyed. I will give you the dates because I would rather you had them from me than reconstructed them. The retention schedule was adopted by the board on 22 May 2024 and executed on 3 September 2024. Your first letter is dated 9 April 2024. I can see the sequence you are looking at and I am not going to pretend it is not there. > > It is nevertheless the wrong inference. The schedule had been in preparation since 2021, the trigger was an insurance revaluation and a store we could no longer heat, and the destruction was witnessed and minuted by three people, one of them our external auditor. I am attaching the minute. It lists every box by shelfmark, including Vorderasien 1927 to 1930, Fotoplatten, because a minute that omitted the interesting box would be worth nothing. > > I would rather you printed the whole of that than a paraphrase of it. > > And now the part I imagine you will not print. You have written to me four times about a photograph and never once about the sixty-one objects in this house's public catalogue whose provenance is thinner than that photograph's. Nobody writes about those. They are dull. There is no burning of tools in them, no midnight, no strike. If your interest were really in what leaves the record and how, you would have asked me a different question two years ago, and I would have answered that one too. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.