Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
KATALIN ANNA KÓTHAY: Houses and households at Kahun: Bureaucratic and Domestic Aspects of Social Organization During the Middle Kingdom
Houses and Households at Kahun: Bureaucratic and Domestic Aspects of Social Organization During the Middle Kingdom T he general idea that the nuclear family predominated in past time has gained wide acceptance from the 1970s. Its importance in pre-industrial societies had first been observed by anthropologists and was then emphasized by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. They suggested a careful treatment of the earlier concept according to which families had tended to be larger in the past and an evolution from extended kinship to nuclear family, had been connected with industrialisation and modernisation. They argued, instead, that the nuclear family had been widespread throughout human history and stressed similarities in the organization of households in every human society. 1 Along with the concept of the universality of this family form, comparative family studies have tended to lay emphasis on its regional, social and historical manifestations, and the strucmral scheme of the nuclear family has been enlarged upon over the last couple of decades. In Egyptology the same conception on the predominance of the nuclear family has crystallized, 2 detailed analyses are very scarce, however. 3 The fonnation of the state and its bureaucracy has been characterized by the disintegration of predynastic village communities, a process during which the extended family is thought to have been succeeded by the nuclear family. 4 The preponderance of the 1 P. Laslett, Introduction: the history of the family, in: P. Laslett, - R. Wall, (eds), Household and Family in Past Time. Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group over the Last Three Centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and Colonial North America, with Further Materials from Western Europe, Cambridge 1977 : , pp. IX, 1-23; J. Goody, The evolution of the family, in: ibid. pp. 103-104 and 123; R. Wall, Introduction, in: R. Wall J. Robin - R. Laslett (eds), Family Forms in Historic Europe, Cambridge 1983, p. 1. 1 S. Allam, Familie, in LÀ II, col. 104; D. O'Connor, Ancient Egyptian Society, Pittsburg 1990, pp. 6ff; E. Feucht, Das Kind im Alten Ägypten: die Stellung des Kindes in Familie und Gesellschaft nach altägyptischen Texten und Darstellungen, Frankfurt-New York 1995, pp. 22, 25-31. 3 Cf. for example M. Atzler, Untersuchungen zur Herausbildung von Herrschaftsformen in Ägypten, HAB 16, Hildesheim 1981, pp. 86-109; D. Franke, Altägyptische Verwandtschaftsbezeichnungen im Mittleren Reich, HÄS 3, Hamburg 1983, pp. 344-346, 349-350. 4 Franke, op. cit. p. 346; O'Connor, loc. cit. (note 2).
