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

particularly apparent in Middle Kingdom sources. Nonetheless, another model of Middle Kingdom society emerges from the funerary sources. The evidence of funerary stelae of middle rank officials and functionaries, with detailed enumeration of family members and working colleagues, attest a rather complicated social organization, to some extent exceeding the rigid bureaucratic system. Similarly, spells from the Coffin Texts expressing the deceased's wish to reunite his human entourage in the afterlife hint at more complex familial and social relationships of an individual.

15 When dealing with the family and the household we must reckon with the same biases. Administrative sources can be expected to envisage a simplified picture of the family and the household, serving bureaucratic needs, while the rather complex social setting of an individual depicted in funerary texts is irrelevant in time and space. Thus, in the first case focus is on the basic social ingredient, i.e. the nuclear family, in the second an enlarged universe of the individual is embedded in the sources, in which extended kin relations predominate. The wpwt-lists from Kahun A few surviving documents (wpwt), belonging to the so-called Kahun townpapyri, one of the two groups of hieratic documents found at the Middle Kingdom settlement site serving the funerary cult of Senwosret II,

16 emerge as starting point to interpretative analyses of Middle Kingdom family and household system.

17 The word wpwt is generally translated 'household list', though it is not evident whether the units recorded in them can in fact be regarded as residential groupings. Although the sample, seven lists concerning two families, may seem too meager for statistical analyses, some principles of the registration of the population can be established. 15 D. Meeks, Notes de lexicographie (§2), RdE (1974), pp. 54-56; Schneider, op. cit. (note 12) pp. 42-46; Franke, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 282-284 and 287. 16 On the two groups of papyri see Kemp, op. cit. (note 14), p. 149; S. Quirke, The Administration of Egypt in the Late Middle Kingdom The Hieratic Documents, SIA Publishing 1990, pp. 156-173. For publication of the town-papyri: F. L. Griffith, The Petrie Papyri. Hieratic Papyri from Kahun and Gurob T—

II, London 1898; for the temple archive: L. Borchardt, Der zweite Papyrusfund von Kahun und die zeitliche Festlegung des mittleren Reiches der ägyptischen Geschichte, ZÄS31 (1899) pp. 89-103; A. Scharff, Briefe aus Illahun, ZÄS 59 (1924) pp. 20-51, Anhang 1-12; U. KaplonyHeckel, Ägyptischen Handschriften I, Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland 19,1, Wiesbaden 1971; U. Luft, Das Archiv von Illahun. Briefe 1, Hieratische Papyri aus den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kultur Besitz, Lieferung 1, Berlin 1992. " Valbellc, op. cit. (note 50), pp. 77-78; D. Valbclle, Les recensements dans l'Egypte pharaonique des troisième et deuxième millénaires, CRIPEL 9 (1987) pp. 36, 45 and 49; Kemp, op. cit. (note 14), p. 156 and fig. 55 on p. 158.