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
assumes the prevalence of the extended family. 12 The two conceptions focus on two different aspects of the Egyptological research. The nuclear family theory insists on the bureaucratic and ideological domains, while the argumentation of the extended family hypothesis is mostly of economic character, laying more emphasis on production as shaping force of society and presupposing less significant connections between the bulk of the population and the state. The problem emerges from the difficulty to match evidence provided by different groups of the sources. In Egyptology, there is a trend to treat separately two basic sets of records, often referred to as monumental and non-monumental. The former is closely connected with the realm of the dead and propaganda and thus thought to represent a picture of the Egyptian society through selection, while the other group is sometimes taken to reflect mundane matters with more objectivity. For any matter of the socio-economic kind the bulk of the data come from funerary context, and only a small amount of non-monumental texts are available for us. Yet these latter documents are far from representing a homogeneous group and are not lacking biases either. An extremely careful critique of every source of pharaonic Egypt has been proposed by Eyre in his recent article on methodological problems of the historiography of ancient Egypt, when directing attention to the inconsistency between the normative role of the central administration and local reality and emphasizing the importance of distinction between ideology and reality. 1 ' Sources are affected by different construed views, which are not easy to perceive in the individual documents. Administrative texts tend toward a simplified view of society reflecting the organization of the inhabitants of the country for particular purposes (public work and taxation), rather than features of local society (system of inheritance, family and household structure, private economic matters, etc.). The same problem is also present in the archaeological record. It has been demonstrated how the archaeological remains of the centrally planned and maintained settlement Kahun attest a view of society constituted by administration. 14 The implications of this bureaucratic paradigm are 12 For ancient Egypt see J. J. Janssen, Die Struktur der pharaonischen Wirtschaft, GM 48 (1981) pp. 62-63; II. D. Schneider, Shabtis I, Leiden 1977, p. 42, is not concerned about the composition of the household, but what he outlines is rather the extended family household. For Mesopotamian society see M. A. Powell, Economy of the Extended Family according to Sumerian Sources. Oikumene 5 (1986) pp. 9-13; also J. N. Postgate. Early Mesopotamia. Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, London-New York 1992, pp. 88-96, who speaks of simple and expanded households, but extended family. 13 Ch. Eyre, Pouvoir central et pouvoirs locaux: problème historiographiques et méthodologiques in Méditerranécs. Revue du Centre d'Etudes Internationales sur la Romanité 24 (2000), pp. 15-17. ''' B. J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt. Anatomy of a Civilization, London-New York 1989, pp. 149-157.
