The goal of this study, broadly speaking, is to better understand how
Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055–1650 BCE) kingship worked from a non-royal
perspective. Egyptological scholarship has traditionally taken for
granted both that Egyptian kings were omnipresent in ancient Egyptian
society, and that the intricacies of kingship were restricted to royal
and elite circles. This contradiction between expected omnipresence and
simultaneous restriction is most often explained through the concept of
“decorum,” which as applied in Egyptology proposes that royal symbols
and the image of the king were confined to the royal sphere. This is a
reductive approach that removes the agency of those outside the royal
circle. Instead, this dissertation prioritizes non-royal agency in
engagement with kingship.
The dissertation’s main argument is constructed from two separate but
related parts: first, kingship was not omnipresent; second, kingship was
still relevant and present in non-royal society in specific
context-dependent ways. The simultaneous omnipresence and restrictedness
of kingship can be differently explained if one considers the relevance
that kingship had to non-royal Egyptians in different circumstances. In
highlighting relevance, this study makes an argument that
restrictedness is not necessarily an imposition from above, but that it
may also be a choice for something else by non-royals. This argument was
developed based on evidence from settlement contexts in Egypt (Chapter
3), royal, divine, and elite monuments and rituals (Chapter 4), and
funerary practice (Chapter 5). Rather than simply a critique of decorum,
this study proposes an opposing explanation for the role of kingship in
broader ancient Egyptian society that takes into account the agency and
priorities of different actors, rather than just the king.
This study can be thought of as a bottom-up exploration of kingship, one
framed by and contextualized in methodologies employed in the
archaeologies of empire and sovereignty. The primary way in which
Egyptology has approached interactions with kingship in the past—as a
largely uniform engagement conditioned by strict decorum—has gotten in
the way of our proper understanding of both kingship itself, as well as
how it fit into broader Egyptian society. Kingship cannot be said to not
have been important. But based on the evidence discussed in this study,
it also cannot be said that the king or kingship were always
overarching concerns. The ways in which kingship was engaged with by
different parts of the population could differ dramatically, and
previous models used to explain non-royal engagement with kingship have
obfuscated that variability. Kingship in the Middle Kingdom was not
monolithic: it was not experienced in the same way by all Egyptians, and
it was more relevant and invoked by some more than other
Degree Type
Ph.D.
Content Type
Dissertation
Publication Date
2023-08
Language
en
Record Created
2023-08-23
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