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

nuclear family is sometimes tied in with the conviction that people from the inferior classes tended to live in simple households (consisting of one conjugal family unit),

5 while larger domestic units were more common among the elite.

6 Yet the attitude of Egyptology towards the insistence on the nuclear family is not supported by enough quantitative data, while different approaches to the question do not provide a hannonious picture at all. The fundamental point of the definition of the family, that is, the word carries both the meaning of a kinship group and that of a domestic group is often overlooked in the Egyptological discourse.

7 Due to lack of enough evidence, demographical and statistical analyses are of little use for the Egyptologist. The ideal picture of the nuclear family is sometimes read from the instructions. This literary genre, however, reflects ideas of the bureaucratic strata, a fact which is not in agreement with the conviction that the simple family household, was more common among the lower social strata, rather than among the elite. Explanations based on archaeological evidence might also oppose this latter view: functional analyses implicitly suggest simple family households both for the elite houses and for the western sector dwelling units of the Middle Kingdom settlement of Kahun.

8 The argumentation for the predominance of the nuclear family is often associated with the fact that the Egyptian terminology denoting kin relations originated from the nuclear family relationship.

9 This phenomenon might be related to the fact that the administration ignored kin relations outside of the nuclear family.

10 Hence these terms might bear out a bureaucratic phraseology, preserved in the language of a literate elite, while terms of address used in every day parlance, which may allow a different picture, could remain unknown to us." An alternative view, though less articulated in Egyptology, underlines the agricultural or peasant character of ancient near eastern civilizations and 5 In this paper 1 use the terminology and typology established by Peter Laslett, in Laslett - Wall, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 2834 and fig. 1.1 on p. 41. 6 Cf. for example Franke, op. cit. (note 3), p. 345. 7 For the very few studies which do distinguish between family and household see Franke, op. cit, and J. Assmann, Das Bild des Vaters im Alten Ägypten, in: H. Tcllcnbach (ed.), Das Vaterbild in Mythos und Geschichte, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1976, pp. 16-17. K D. O'Connor, The elite houses of Kahun, in: J. Phillips et al. (eds), Ancient Egypt, the Aegean, and the Near East. Studies in Honour of Martha Rhoads Bell, San Antonio 1997, II, pp. 389-400; F. Arnold, A Study of Egyptian Domestic Buildings, VA 5 (1989), p. 78. ' Allam, op. cit. (note 2) col. 105; G. Robins, The Relationship Specified by Egyptian Kinship Terms of the Middle and New Kingdoms, CdE 54 (1979), pp. 199-201; Atzler, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 90-91; O'Connor, op. cit. (note 2), p. 6. 10 O'Connor, op. cit., p. 6. " For the centralized nature of Egyptian writing see J. Baines, Literacy, social organization, and the archaeological record: the case of early Egypt, in: J. Gledhill ct al. (eds), State and Society. The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization, London 1988, pp. 207-208.