VILLAGES IN ANCIENT EGYPT

Deir el Medina

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France wrote: “Villages were the backbone of rural organization in Pharaonic Egypt. Inner solidarity and family ties are recorded in literary texts as well as by the use of certain terms, which highlight their “clanic” structure, at least from the New Kingdom on. The relations between villages, royal administration, and institutional centers like the temples or the domains of the crown enabled the rural elite to enhance their status and wealth, thus preserving inequalities while providing paths to social elevation. But specific village values centered on solidarity, the praise of fellow citizens, and the celebration of prominent local ancestors served to strengthen the communal ties of its members. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Villages are a rather elusive element of the Egyptian landscape. Usually regarded as the backbone of the rural organization of the country and its settlement structure, they remain nevertheless almost invisible in the archaeological record. The vocabulary is not exempt from ambiguities, and terms like njwt, dmj(t), wHyt, tmj, and others may be translated as “village” even if they cover a rather large but often imprecise array of meanings, from the more general (“locality,” even “toponym”) to the more specific (“town,” “city,” “village”), as in the case of njwt.

“The scarcity of extensive archaeological surveys represents a further difficulty since it has greatly hindered a thorough understanding of its settlement and landscape organization, its regional variability, and its transformations over time—a gap that only recent research is beginning to fill. Finally, the few villages extensively studied (the “workers’ village” at el-Amarna or Deir el-Medina being the best known) were in fact rather atypical in that they were highly specialized communities devoted to specific tasks at the service of the state and not true rural communities.

“In spite of the ambiguities of Egyptian terminology, a close examination of the sources reveals important changes over time in both the organization of the rural landscape and in the way villages were named. Njwt appears already in the oldest records to refer to both large and small centers of population, from cities to hamlets, and its hieroglyph also accompanied the names of regions and toponyms. But with the advent of the New Kingdom, an important change took place: terms like dmj(t) and wHyt began to be employed to denote villages, while njwt was usually restricted to metropoleis and religious capital cities. The first term, dmj(t), formerly meant “port,” “landing stage,” while the second, wHyt, appears in Middle Kingdom texts with the basic meaning of “clan,” “tribe.” The reasons underlying such a change are difficult to ascertain, but one can speculate that dmj(t) could be related to the fact that mooring posts became centers of fiscal and economic importance during the New Kingdom. As for wHyt, its frequency in New Kingdom and later texts suggests that kinship and a strong sense of communal identity were recognized as the framework of village social structure.

“A particularly well documented example is the famous 19th Dynasty Saqqara tomb inscription of Mose, which shows that the inhabitants of a wHyt were linked by family ties and claimed to be the descendants of a soldier. The popularity of the two terms is apparent in New Kingdom and later phraseology, when they were evoked alongside njwt as the three main types of settlement in Egypt. Another well-known document, the Wilbour Papyrus, provides a unique overview of the countryside in an area of Middle Egypt, as it mentions 51 mounds (jAt), 37 houses (at), 29 villages (wHyt), 17 “villas” (bxn), and 7 towers (sgA) among its main settlements. As Kemp observes, these centers were not evenly spread out within the area covered by this document: bxn and sgA cluster in zones marked by larger towns (hardly surprising as bxn was an official’s residence), whereas at tend to be more numerous in zones where there were fewer larger towns. Other late New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period sources confirm this picture as they list together bxn, wHyt, pr, and at. Finally, during the 1st millennium, villages were usually referred to by the term tmj.

Websites on Ancient Egypt: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Discovering Egypt discoveringegypt.com; BBC History: Egyptians bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians ; Ancient History Encyclopedia on Egypt ancient.eu/egypt; Digital Egypt for Universities. Scholarly treatment with broad coverage and cross references (internal and external). Artifacts used extensively to illustrate topics. ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt ; British Museum: Ancient Egypt ancientegypt.co.uk; Egypt’s Golden Empire pbs.org/empires/egypt; Metropolitan Museum of Art www.metmuseum.org ; Oriental Institute Ancient Egypt (Egypt and Sudan) Projects ; Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre in Paris louvre.fr/en/departments/egyptian-antiquities; KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt kmtjournal.com; Ancient Egypt Magazine ancientegyptmagazine.co.uk; Egypt Exploration Society ees.ac.uk ; Amarna Project amarnaproject.com; Egyptian Study Society, Denver egyptianstudysociety.com; The Ancient Egypt Site ancient-egypt.org; Abzu: Guide to Resources for the Study of the Ancient Near East etana.org; Egyptology Resources fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

Setting of Ancient Egyptian Villages

Deir el Medina

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France wrote: “Evaluating the number and geographical distribution of villages in ancient Egypt is a highly problematic task: administrative sources are scarce and no general census has survived. Nevertheless, sporadic evidence as well as parallels from later periods suggest that about 178 small “cities” and 1125 large villages could have existed during the Pharaonic period. As for the territory under their control, it is not surprising that a great variability is discernible from the data preserved, even between centers of a similar status located in the same area: thus, for instance, the cultivated area of the Ptolemaic villages of Kerkeosiris (in 116 - 115 B.C.) and Tebtunis (in 240 B.C.), both in the Fayum, were, respectively, 1179.25 and 2182.69 arouras (about 3.25 and 6 kilometers²). [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Recent archaeological research gives a glimpse into the historical and geographical setting of villages for specific periods in Egyptian history. At Hierakonpolis, for example, the gradual growth of the city in Predynastic times was concomitant with the disappearance of many of the villages in its hinterland, thus suggesting that large sections of the peasant population were concentrated in a single urban center. The area of Aswan reveals a quite similar phenomenon: the emergence of Elephantine as the focus of Pharaonic power on its southernmost frontier was contemporaneous with the abandonment of the villages south of the city, which were reoccupied after the collapse of the central authority at the end of the Old Kingdom. In other cases, villages flourished in areas relevant to their strategic or economic importance. The easternmost branch of the Nile in Lower Egypt was one of them, and the turn of the 4th millennium saw the emergence and the expansion of many localities around it, a development not paralleled in the western Delta and related to the consolidation of a united monarchy with significant commercial interests in the southern Levant. But in the absence of archaeological research, it is impossible to assert what the features and the structure of a “typical” Egyptian village were; the orthogonal plans of “institutional villages” such as el-Lahun and the “workers’ village” at el-Amarna or Deir el-Medina are probably not representative at all, whereas the idea that the hieroglyph for njwt represents the basic structure of a village (a crossroad of two main streets) is highly speculative.

“Administrative documents and titles provide some information about the historical rural landscape and the role the villages played. Thus, the titles of Metjen, a 4th Dynasty official with numerous territorial responsibilities, show that former supra- territorial units called pr (“house, domain”), each encompassing several villages (njwt), were being replaced by a different administrative model, when royal foundations (usually Hwt-aAt, “great Hwt,” but also Hwt) became the focus of these districts (Sethe Urk. I: 1 - 7). The echoes of such a system can be found in the slightly later Gebelein papyri, from the reign of Menkaura, where several villages constituted a domain (pr-Dt) presumably granted to an official; in Heqanakht’s letters from the early second millennium, the area called Pr-hAA/Hwt-hAA, “the domain/royal foundation of the descending (water),” also included several localities. When the royal centers, Hwt, became widely spread all over Egypt, from the end of the 5th Dynasty on, funerary phraseology echoed their growing importance by means of a pair of terms, Hwt and njwt, thus evoking the most conspicuous elements of the Egyptian countryside: the royal foundations, on the one hand, and the “organic” towns and villages on the other. The “Hwwt and njwwt” formula survived until the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, even if Hwwt were no longer founded after the beginning of the 12th Dynasty. The two terms were so inextricably connected that the expression “you are like a town/village (njwt) without its governor (HoA Hwt)” conveyed the notion of chaos in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. By the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, a new formula arose, njwt, town, village,” being opposed to sxt, “marshland, field,” in literary and administrative sources; in the New Kingdom, the counterpart of njwt or dmj(t) was w, “district”.”

Village Development of Deir el-Medina

Deir el Medina

Deir el-Medina was an ancient Egyptian village that was home to the artisans who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings during the 18th to 20th dynasties of the New Kingdom period. Jaana Toivari-Viitala of the University of Helsinki wrote: “The central feature of the site is the village settlement, flanked by two necropoleis (east and west). Excavation of the settlement began in the early twentieth century by Italian and German expeditions. [Source: Jaana Toivari-Viitala, University of Helsinki, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2011, escholarship.org ]

“The first phase of the village dates to the early New Kingdom. Cartouches of Thutmose I (1504–1492 B.C.) stamped upon bricks in the enclosure wall provide the earliest dating. A dozen houses flanked the sides of a central pathway in the southern part of the settlement enclosure during this earliest phase. A few remains of domestic structures were located in the northern part.

“A major transformation of the village coincides with the administrative reorganization of the work crew that took place during the reign of Horemheb (1323– 1295 B.C.), increasing the number of houses in the village to approximately 40. Whether the village was abandoned during the Amarna Period is still debated. Altogether 12 modifications have been identified in the village layout, resulting in its rectangular form (northeast-southwest axis), covering 5600 square meters during its later phase. Within the enclosure, about 68 houses flank a central road following the village’s general alignment. An area where water jars were stored (zir-area) is situated outside the northeastern end of the enclosure wall. Some houses are also situated outside the enclosure.

“The basic structure of the houses, each of which Bruyère named and provenanced with a number and letters, consists of an outer room with a second room functioning as the main living area, often with a column supporting the roof and a bench along one wall. A rectangular, bed-like, unfired brick construction (a lit-clos, or enclosed bed) with a plaster and paint finish is found in a corner of most of the outer rooms. Remains of decoration show that many of these have been decorated with motifs associated with fertility. A smaller room is situated behind the second room, next to a corridor opening to a kitchen area at the back of the house. A flight of stairs leads to the roof.

“Most of the houses have undergone alterations, in which space was divided or added to. The fluctuation in the number of village inhabitants reflected the fluctuations in the number of workmen employed at the royal necropoleis. The usual number of household members might have been between three and five, if not more. The village was abandoned some time during the reign of Ramesses XI (1099–1069 B.C.), but the site continued to be frequented as a sacred place, where old standing structures were reused and modified to serve as burial places, chapels, temples, and churches into the eighth century CE. As the village contained masses of finds, an exact provenance for every artifact has not always been documented. “

Village Life in Ancient Egypt

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France wrote:Deir el-Medina was home to a “community of artists and workers employed in the construction and decoration of the New Kingdom royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The considerable mass of documents preserved there, describing the day-to-day lives of its inhabitants, makes it the best-documented community of ancient Egypt...The documents cast light on the community’s conflicts and social practices, from gifts among ladies to the promotion of royal cults by local scribes, from theft to pious donations, from literacy and the possession of private libraries to strikes and small economic operations involving donkeys, credit, or transfers of slave-days.” [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2013 escholarship.org ]

The papyri of Gebelein, one of the earliest archives from pharaonic Egypt, record lists of people and their occupations in several villages around Gebelein. According to the papyri, many of the village dwellers exploited the natural resources of the region, from hunting to fowling and collecting honey, revealing that the villages were more than strictly agricultural communities. Even some “nomads” were settled there too, thus pointing to the fluidity of relations between the Nile Valley and the neighboring areas. A small fragment of papyrus also records several mjtrw , a controversial term that in early times probably designated a category of (male and female) traders, as if part of the population of the villages were also involved in trading activities. Later sources reveal that contacts with des ert and foreign populations still played an important role at Gebelein. A cemetery of Nubian soldiers, dating from the First Intermediate Period, shows that the graves’ occupants had been settled in Gebelein and had acquired property, a lifestyle, and values that probably did not differ greatly from those of their Egyptian neighbors. Nubian people from the Pan-Grave Culture also crossed the Nile Valley. Their cemeteries, dating to the early centuries of the second millennium BCE and scattered along the Valley, reveal that they were part of the local landscape, probably as peddlers. In some cases, small sanctuaries close to the Valley show that they worshipped Hathor.

“Differences in wealth were obviously mirrored in the economy of villagers. Thus, for instance, yokes and ploughs, and probably donkeys too, were only accessible to rich peasants, whereas common villagers seem to have practiced intensive horticulture in small gardens. Archaeozoological research is providing increasing evidence of the importance of small-scale animal husbandry (pigs, sheep, and goats) in humble domestic contexts, and fish appears to have been an important component of poor people’s diets, sometimes imported from distant places thanks to private commercial circuits. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Regional patterns of production and processing of food (i.e., barley at Abydos as opposed to emmer in Giza and Memphis), seasonal activities, the importance of fodder provision, the social patterns of differentiated consumption, etc. reveal a village economy less static and rather more complex than previously assumed, which was also subject to changes over time. Consequently, social hierarchy and wealth inequalities were reinforced by the risks inherent to agriculture as well as by indebtedness or heritage divisions, thus fostering clientelism and servitude and reinforcing the power of local leaders whose status was further enhanced by their connections with temples, regional potentates, and the agents of the crown.”

Activities and Occupations in Ancient Egyptian Villages

fishing

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France: “ Leaving aside such “institutional” communities as Deir el-Medina or the pyramid towns, which relied directly on the Pharaonic administration, agriculture and herding were the main productive activities of Egyptian villages. It is probable that fishing and extensive herding led to the development of specific kinds of settlements and temporary encampments in particularly favored areas like the Fayum or the Delta. The 8th Dynasty inscription of Henqu of Deir el-Gabrawi, for instance, opposes two kinds of landscape, one formerly inhabited by fowlers, fishermen, and extensive herders, but subsequently settled by people and provided with flocks . The Gebelein papyri, from the end of the 4th Dynasty, contain a detailed list of the (presumable) heads of the households of several localities. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Many villagers were Hm nswt, “serf of the king,” or jst, “member of a team of workers,” and were probably peasants, but others were involved in activities such as herding, hunting, collecting honey, or fishing, and even some Hrj-Sa, “nomad”, are cited. Moreover, other people worked as millers and ship’s carpenters, whereas the scribes and agents of the crown must have formed the local elite alongside the chiefs of the villages. Thus, these documents provide an invaluable glimpse into the occupations and economic activities of some villages. Commercial activities are rarely documented, but marketplaces put the villagers in contact with other producers, traders, and institutions.

“Several New Kingdom papyri record ships in the service of temples, which collected goods from many localities, and some data suggest that private trade was also conducted during these journeys. It is possible that the growing importance of dmj(t) (“town, village,” but formerly “moorings, port”) in New Kingdom sources might be related to the growing importance of trade and river connections in the organization of the landscape. Finally, the tomb robbery papyri of the late New Kingdom reveal that private trade linked villagers and merchants, with precious metals fuelling non-institutional economic circuits where gold and silver were exchanged for plots of land, animals, and goods.

Internal Hierarchy in Ancient Egyptian Villages

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France wrote: “The often assumed image of villages as egalitarian paradises must be discarded, with no traces of communal property within them. Instead, the most ancient sources reveal that they were characterized by internal hierarchies and inequalities of wealth. Village governors are their best documented members, frequently evoked in administrative records because of their role as intermediaries between the authorities and the mass of villagers. Such a strategic position procured them some advantages: they acted as informal agents of the crown in the countryside, and their collaboration was essential for delivering taxes and manpower to the state. In some instances, their position was symbolically enhanced by the possession of prestige items usually restricted to the palatial and administrative elite of the kingdom. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Old Kingdom sources refer to them as HoA njwt, “governor of a locality,” but later they are commonly called HAtj-a, “mayor” (nA HAtjw-a nA dmjw wHywt, “the mayors of the towns and villages”: Gardiner 1947: 31*). Other members of the village elite were the priests and scribes; in the case of the household (pr.s, “her house”) of the lady Tepi, quoted in the Gebelein papyri, it was made up of a scribe, a letter carrier (jrj mDAt), and a “property manager” (jrj jxt; Posener-Kriéger and Demichelis 2004: pl. 16H). In other cases, wealthy peasants appear in charge of the property of the temples, delivering taxes in gold or possessing enough resources to rent extensive tracts of land, like some jHwtjw of the New Kingdom and some nmHw in the 1st millennium B.C.. One such New Kingdom jHwtj, Horiherneferher, was one of the notables (rmT aA, “great people”) of his village in the famous lawsuit of Mose.

“In general, archaeology reveals the existence of such social differences through the goods buried in private tombs, and the information it provides confirms the picture shown by administrative documents. Finally, local priestly offices (especially low ranking functions like wab) not only conferred prestige and served to visualize and consolidate social hierarchies, but could also be used as a means of self-promotion thanks to the contacts, patronage links, and income they procured. Local notables are referred to as rmT aA, “great people,” from the late New Kingdom on.”

Village Chiefs in Ancient Egypt

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France wrote: “Old Kingdom funerary iconography usually depicts the chiefs of villages bowing to, or being beaten by, higher authorities to whom they are mere bearers of tribute and taxes. In some instances, as in a famous scene in the 18th-dynasty tomb of Rekhmira, the quantities of cloth, precious metals, and other goods the chiefs carried were carefully recorded. When the authority of the monarchy collapsed, however, village chiefs appear in a more positive light, as repositories of authority and resources, and as links to social networks that provided protection for their communities. In a total reversion of roles, it was then that scribes and administrators proudly proclaimed that they served under these chiefs. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2013 escholarship.org ]

“Leaving aside these rather biased claims, administrative texts mention village chiefs as indispensable mediators for implementing orders of the king. Apparently this role was sometimes materially rewarded, as some of these local leaders managed to afford for themselves prestigious items (such as statues and inscribed objects, usually reserved for officials and the elite) that marked their local preeminence. To their subordinates and the people living under their jurisdiction they acted as patronage leaders and sources of authority, probably based on a mix of prestige, family origins, wealth, and traditional authority . In late third and early second millennium BCE Elephantine, for instance, the local elite appear as a reduced but closely knit social group, in which rituals and ceremonies, veneration of a(n ideally) common ancestor, and the mutual exchange of goods in funerary rituals helped maintain their cohesion as a social group as well as their position and prestige as rulers of their community. In fact, it was from this group that governors and other local leaders were issued.

“Having left practically no written trace about themselves, it appears that village chiefs were basically local potentates and wealthy farmer s, closely connected to local temples. Texts from the first millennium BCE refer to them a s “big men,” in control of their communities. A Demotic literary text gives some clues about their power, when one such “big man” kept close ties to the local temple that further strengthened his authority. He was also a priest in the local temple —a function that provided him with a profitable source of income. He received part of the agricultural income of the sanctuary because of his service as a priest and, in addition, he exploited some temple fields as a cultivator in exchange for a portion of the harves t; the considerable wealth thus amassed allowed him to pay wages to the personnel of the temple, who were thus considered his clients (the text states that he had “acquired” them) and he could even marry his daughters to priests and potentates (lit. “great men”) of another town.”

Royal Administration of Villages in Ancient Egypt

Egyptian official

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia of the CNRS in France wrote: “The relations of the villages with the royal administration are the best documented aspect of their existence. The most ancient records state that villages could be granted to high officials and members of the royal family as a reward for their services; in fact, the papyri of Gebelein deal with some villages, which formed one part of such rewards, the pr-Dt, “house of the body,” of an unknown official in the late 4th Dynasty. Nevertheless, these papyri also reveal that the villagers had obligations to many contributions to the royal administration, including working on architectural projects. Later documents such as the Horemheb or the Nauri decrees show that royal agents could make requisitions of manpower in villages and force their governors to deliver goods at the mooring posts, to cultivate the land of the pharaoh, or to accomplish corvée services for the temples. Other deliveries included cloth, animals, and gold, as the “taxation scene” in the 18th Dynasty Theban tomb of Rekhmira, the Amarna Period talatat, or the Ramesside administrative documents show; villages could also be taxed with specific supplies for a cult. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Nevertheless, the main contribution of villages was manpower. Old Kingdom sources evoke many administrative bureaus, which could request workers from Upper Egypt and which kept lists of men liable to be conscripted. The Gebelein papyri are a good example of such lists, while the decrees of Coptos suggest that villagers were recruited to work at a local estate of the temple of Min. The stone marks in the mastaba of Khentika at Balat also show a system whereby people from different localities successively carried the blocks to be used in the monument. Texts of the Middle Kingdom, like the Reisner and Lahun papyri, the stone marks in the pyramids of the kings, or the Hammamat inscriptions describe in detail the local organization of teams of workers, their conscription, and the role played by the governors of the villages in their recruitment.

“Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to determine the impact of such requisitions on the local economy and the domestic life cycle (partial dependence of villagers on the ration system, manpower diverted to the administration demands, obligation to produce specific crops and goods, incorporation of poor people into the “state sector,” etc.), not to mention on village society (reinforcement of the power of the local elite, opportunities for ambitious individuals, increase of inequalities). The crisis of the central authority at the end of the Old Kingdom, for example, was followed by an increase of wealth in private provincial tombs, a fact that could be linked to less fiscal pressure but also to the “reinvestment” of resources in the local sphere. Perhaps the mentions of uncultivated land and extensive cattle breeding in the contemporaneous el- Moalla and Deir el-Gabrawi inscriptions point to an alternative model of production, less dependent on intensive agriculture and only possible when the fiscal impact of the state weakened or simply vanished.”

Culture and Values of Ancient Egyptian Villages

“In spite of the official bias of the bulk of our sources, some references reveal that the village was an important element in the construction of social identities. Late 3rd millennium texts, for example, introduce for the first time epithets and titles stressing links with the town and the village. In a period of armed conflicts, individual members of the local militia were called anx n njwt, “soldier,” the expression s n njwt, “a man of the town,” began to refer to “citizens,” and the very concept of nTr njwt, “local god,” became popular in private monuments. [Source: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2011, escholarship.org ]

“But it is in the realm of the private inscriptions where the importance of the praise and approval of the citizens, of acting in favor of one’s locality, appear for the first time as proof of personal prestige and distinction, to the point that epithets like mry n njwt.f, “one beloved of his town,” or Hzy n njwt.f, “praised by his town,” figure prominently in the autobiographies and monuments of this period. Later teachings and sapiential literature assert the importance of the village as a cohesive and protective social network for its members, linked not only by endogamy but also by solidarity and mutual obligation ties controlled by the local notables. A discernible self-awareness of belonging to a community appears as a highly esteemed value, whilst the village temple and the local cult centers become basic pillars of collective identity.

“Nevertheless, archaeology also shows that popular, private religion relied extensively on magic and cults of natural forces, while ancestor cults and collective burials were foci of family memory and identity. In this respect, finds from New Kingdom Kom el- Rabia, a suburb of Memphis, are probably quite representative of the conditions prevailing in the countryside, as they reveal a duality of cultic forms linked to social status, with figurines and amulets being widely spread among commoners while small stelae were reserved for low rank priests living in the neighborhood. In any case, it is quite probable that the local priesthood was reserved for the wealthiest villagers and local notables, the same social sectors who could sometimes afford for themselves the type of prestige items (statues, decorated sarcophagi, inscribed objects, etc.) usually restricted to the administrative elite, thus enhancing their status inside the communities they ruled.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Tour Egypt, Minnesota State University, Mankato, ethanholman.com; Mark Millmore, discoveringegypt.com discoveringegypt.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated September 2018