Kinship Terminology in the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts

CAMPAGNO, MARCELO

Alejandría

Conferencia; Conference "Kinship Terminology in the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts"; 2013

Writing and Scripts Center, Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The incidence of kinship can clearly be recognized in the oldest surviving corpus of long written texts, that is, the Pyramid Texts of the Late Old Kingdom The use of kinship terms is frequent along the Texts and allows us to note its importance to express the links among gods or between gods and kings. In turn, the representation of these links through kinship terms is indicative of the relevance of kinship in the society that produced those Texts. Taking this into account, this lecture will focus on the kinship relations that appear in the Pyramid Texts, trying to establish their importance inside the corpus of texts as well as in the Old Kingdom Egyptian society. The analysis is intended to identify: a) the specific terms used in these texts as well as their frequency; b) the referents of kinship terms, in order to determine the range of their use; and c) the verbal predicates associated with the main terms occurring in that corpus, which allows us to capture some ancient ideas about different roles within the Egyptian kinship system.