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

other house following this event. Should it be occupied by an unknown brother of Hori, with or without family, the widow and the orphans would have been expected to stay with him. It does not seem plausible either that a married sister of Hori stayed there since that woman would rather be supposed to live in his husband's independent or paternal home, since marriage residence was normally neo- or patrilocal.

21 The depiction of family life in autobiographical texts and didactic literature shows new couples living in separate houses.

22 Yet the statement expressed in some later instructions, suggesting that it is better to have one's own small house than to live with parents, might reflect an ideal state of affairs rather than a genuine practice. The insistence on this idyllic picture may indeed imply that to run an independent house was not the norm. The interpretation of the oft-cited phrase grg pr, usually translated 'to found a house', 'to establish household' is not unambiguous either. Franke emphasizes that in this context the verb grg may have the significance 'to equip with, to furnish', rather than 'to found, to establish', and he equally stresses that the office as well as the house of a man was taken over by his son.

23 It is thus not improbable that the two nuclear families lived together even before the death of Hori's father. An alternative possibility is that they lived in neighboring houses, but then the originally separate houses might even be interconnected.

24 If the family of Hori and that of his father shared residence and they were still registered separately by the administration, we can assume that multiple family households were acknowledged by the administration if only one male family head was present in the household. Correspondingly, the addition of the conjugal family unit of Hori's mother together with her minor or unmarried daughters first to the list of his son and later to that of his grandson means that the administration ignored conjugal family units without male heads. Lists from other periods show that women were never registered as household heads, nevertheless they could own houses,

25 and inherit their husband's property, including house.

26 The raison for this must be searched for in the patrilineal pattern of officialdom. The similar phenomenon can be observed in the 21 Franke, op. cit. (noie 3), p. 317; Assmann, op. cit. (noie 7), p. 16. 22 Feucht, op. cit. (noie 2), pp. 24-25. " Franke, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 268-269. 24 For transformations of some of the Kahun houses see below. ?

' G. Robins, Women in Ancient, British Museum Press 1993, p. 99. 26 For Middle Kingdom example see the imyt-pr made by Wah to his wife: Griffith, op. cit (note 16). pl. XIII, 6-14; for discussion of the text see below.