Cuestiones de parentesco en los Textos de la Pirámide de Pepi I

CAMPAGNO, MARCELO

Parentesco, patronazgo y Estado en las sociedades antiguas

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2009; p. 25 - 50

The importance of kinship in social organization can be recognized in many ancient societies. For Ancient Egypt, one of the domains in which its significance is particularly clear is the divine sphere, in which the main relationships among gods, or between the king and the gods, are usually expressed in terms of kinship. This situation can clearly be seen – among many other contexts – in the oldest surviving corpus of long written texts, that is, the Pyramid Texts of the Late Old Kingdom. In this paper, I  focus on the largest unit in this corpus, the texts of the pyramid of Pepi I. 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. In studying these aspects, I hope to capture some ancient ideas about different roles within the Egyptian kinship system.