Living Forever

Self-Presentation in Ancient Egypt

Hussein Bassir

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789774169014
• eBook ISBN: 9781617979620
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Self-presentation is the oldest and most common component of ancient Egyptian high culture. It arose in the context of private tomb records, where the character and role of an individual—invariably a well-to-do non-royal elite official or administrator—were presented purposefully: published by inscription and image, to a contemporary audience and to posterity.

Living Forever: Self-presentation in Ancient Egypt looks at how and why non-royal elites in ancient Egypt represented themselves, through language and art, on monuments, tombs, stelae, and statues, and in literary texts, from the Early Dynastic Period to the Thirtieth Dynasty. Bringing together essays by international Egyptologists and archaeologists from a range of backgrounds, the chapters in this volume offer fresh insight into the form, content, and purpose of ancient Egyptian presentations of the self. Applying different approaches and disciplines, they explore how these self-representations, which encapsulated a discourse with gods and men alike, yield rich historical and sociological information, provide examples of ancient rhetorical devices and repertoire, and shed light on notions of the self and collective memory in ancient Egypt.

1

Egyptian Self-Presentation
Dynamics and Strategies

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Christopher Eyre

Textual self-presentation lies at the beginning of social discourse as preserved from Egypt: to be addressed through its history and its target audiences.¹ In practice this means, at least initially, the tomb record. Modern knowledge of individual self-perception is dependent on the archaeological record—tombs, monuments, and their inscriptions—presenting the individual to an audience that was contemporary in its attitudes and preconceptions.² This self-presentation was purposeful, encapsulating a discourse with its specific audiences, although it may seem one-sided in the way it is articulated. The relationship to non-monumental genres—particularly those of wisdom literature and narrative—is thematically strong, but formally more elusive: the discourse only survives where formal genres of communication gelled into written form.

Characteristic of all textual material, to the modern mind, is the absence of any serious focus on the internal life of the individual, or his private and emotional life. Personality is subordinate to societal identity as the theme of public presentation, used to exemplify societal role and not internalized. This is, self-evidently, an issue of what was appropriate for public discourse: an issue of social acculturation and contemporary imperatives of honor and respect. This does not imply that the internal life of the individual was less intensively felt, but rather that it was not publically discussed. The surviving material provides an externalizing focus on the individual, into socially located norms, through what he chooses to discuss.

Autobiography is, for any society, rooted in cultural expectations and governed by topics with which its audience will engage and identify in the subject’s social context. In that sense, content is as ideological in modern (auto)biography as it is in Egyptian self-presentation, where individuality as aberrant originality is not a focus of contemporary identification, and emotion is not a theme for publication or discourse. Such display of emotion broke with the cultural expectation of dignity, encapsulated in the ‘silent man’ (gr), whose self-control marked elite behavior, against the undignified display of emotion which marked low social behavior; but whose self-control was set off by his quality of iqr (competence in action). Merit, attainment, and social leadership are the themes for identification, and not internal life.

Monuments as Self-Presentation

The history of Old Kingdom Egypt is very largely that of its tombs. The initial development of large, stone-built and decorated tombs is essentially restricted to Saqqara and Giza, close to the contemporary royal tombs, and seeming to reflect a restricted and central court culture,³ replacing a broader geographical distribution in the Early Dynastic Period. The earliest major tombs are anepigraphic, asserting the importance of their owners in ways we cannot trace. Only gradually does pictorial, and more slowly textual decoration increase in importance. This record is not, however, to be understood purely as extravagance in burial practice, nor simply a complex but autonomous mode of preservation of the body, providing the material location and magical assurance of an afterlife. It has also to be understood as a mode of presentation to and integration with the living. The tomb was the place where the dead remain socialized with the living.

In the high Old Kingdom, endowed cult performance asserted a continuing association with the (now dead) court of the (now dead) king, as well as family continuity. It is in this context that self-presentation is first explicit in ways open to serious analysis: in the tomb as a whole, in the development of pictorial self-presentation—painting, relief decoration, and statuary—and then in textual address. This text belongs to the material record: part of the physical object, and not only words and sentences. Even at later periods, the textual self-presentation involves memorialization through monumental inscription and the performance of cult, asserting a social identity with both the living and the dead.⁴

At the core of modern evaluation lie the relationships between audience, functionality, and aesthetic. The issues are the same for both art and text, where the balance between individuation and presentation of role is central.⁵ For instance, rare examples of textual self-presentation by women, which appear in the Late Period, are extremely limited in content and focused on a socially constrained set of themes: honor, beauty, family, marriage, husband, children, piety and divine service, early death.⁶ This parallels the visual presentation of a woman in her husband’s tomb. When, exceptionally, a woman had a tomb of her own, no husband was depicted in it: as tomb owner she was the sole point of reference, and not subordinated.

The obvious fact that both art and text are creations where a sophisticated aesthetic matters, in parallel to their functionality, is core to their discourse and their appeal to an audience.⁷ Eloquence is central to the formal structure of textual self-presentation, located in social context where eloquence defined the contemporary aesthetic and carried social prestige.⁸ The monumental record then targets the permanent reification of what is depicted or recounted—the reification of the tomb owner as individual through his core interests—parallel to the permanent physical reification of the dead in an afterlife, but it presents that as a continuing social interaction, and not an autonomous, magical reification.

Verbal self-presentation survives as an inscriptional genre, deeply integrated into its monumental context, but this is only a partial categorization. Its history⁹ lies in a complex interaction with the development of the writing system, through greater complexity in what was written down, and the interrelationships between self-presentation and other literary genres, which do not appear in writing before the Middle Kingdom. One line of argument focuses, in a positivist way, on the monumental record as an autonomous body of evidence for the creation of a specifically inscriptional genre of literature: the beginning of an evolutionary history of Egyptian literature.¹⁰ However, the act of inscription was itself purposeful, directly targeted at an audience and at a reciprocal discourse. The artistic structure was rooted in a performative style, although it is impossible directly to document ways in which monumental texts drew on genres of not-written self-presentation, and the use of performative literature more broadly in social rituals of this life. In practice, form and content provide the only evidence, beyond location, for hypothesis about purpose and audience.

Audience and Content

Textual self-presentation is first located in a central necropolis, where access to the necessary resources and craftsmen to build a tomb marked status within the court circle. Self-presentation begins as an expansion of the labeling of depictions of the tomb owner by titles and epithets,¹¹ as a discourse with the visitor develops, in the context of a direct address to the living by the dead, particularly at the tomb entrance. There is a focus on the justification of the speaker: his proper acquisition of and rights to both tomb and social role, with incidental evidence of royal favor, and threats against disrespectful behavior, providing self-justification in the request for performance of the offering ritual. The visitor behaves as a subordinate, showing respect and making an offering. The tomb owner will continue—in the social role of patron—to assist, punish, and seek retribution as a ghost: an Ax who is iqr apr (effective and equipped) to intervene for good or evil. For those who provide food and service, he will provide assistance as a patron. The focus lies on meritorious, j...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledge
• Illustration
• Contributers
• Map
• Chronolgy
• Abbreviation
• foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Egyptian Self-Presentation Dynamics and Strategies
• 2 Self-Presentation in the Early Dynasties
• 3 Self-Presentation in the Fourth Dynasty
• 4 Self-Presentation in the Late Old Kingdom
• 5 Self-Presentation in the Eleventh Dynasty
• 6 Self-Presentation in the Twelfth Dynasty
• 7 Self-Presentation in the Second Intermediate Period
• 8 Self-Presentation in the Eighteenth Dynasty
• 9 Self-Presentation in the Ramesside Period
• 10 Self-Presentation in the Third Intermediate Period
• 11 Self-Presentation in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty
• 12 Self-Presentation in the Late Dynastic Period
• 13 Women's Self-Presentation in Pharaonic Egypt
• 14 Traditions of Egyptian Self-Presentation