John Baines

Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society

From its first occurrence around 3000 B.C., writing was integral to the self-definition of Egyptian culture, especially in terms of display where it was part of a system of pictorial representation. By 2600 continuous texts were produced and any linguistic matter could be written; new genres of text appeared in stages, literary texts in the Middle Kingdom and some additional types in the New Kingdom. Very few people were literate, all of them officials of state; schooling was limited. The main script types, hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic, have different, complementary functions. The entire system survived into late Roman times alongside the more widespread Greek. Writing can be related to textual elaboration, to the sense of the past, magic and law, and perhaps to social change and stability but not as an overriding explanatory factor. Thus writing cannot explain the failure of radical change in Egypt or its success in Greece. The potential of writing is realised in stages over millennia.

Communication and display: the integration of early Egyptian art and writing

Our contemporary world is literate, alphabetical, and controlled by texts. Written texts are formally more important than images, and the separation of words and pictures is sharp. When writing is pictographic, the distinction is not always so sharp, and in early civilizations both texts and pictures were rather scarce things. Here, the places of texts and images in Egypt, and their relative standing, are explored.

Burial and the dead in ancient Egyptian society: Respect, formalism, neglect

Ancient Egypt offers a paradigm contrast between ideals of respectful care for the dead, on the one hand, and realities of medium- and long-term neglect, destruction and reuse on the other. Ideals are expressed in normative mortuary monuments and in texts; the archaeological record, together with relatively few skeptical texts, testifies to realities. Death was as socially riven as the realm of the living. Vast amounts were invested in royal and elite monuments, while cemeteries as a whole cannot account for more than a fraction of the population. Preservation of the body was essential for conventional conceptions of an afterlife - often envisaged to take place away from the tomb - but embalming practices cannot have been required for all. The contradictions implied by divergences from the ideal were negotiated over very long periods. Such processes of accommodation may be particularly necessary in complex societies and civilizations. They emphasize that, even if the actors may present the matter otherwise, treatment of the dead relates as much to the living as to the deceased.

Restricted Knowledge, Hierarchy, and Decorum: Modern Perceptions and Ancient Institutions

In terms of the history of Egyptology, the issues addressed in this paper can be summarized in the questions of why a society that exhibited a high degree of inequality and exclusion has often been presented as rather uniform, with free access to knowledge and in theory meritocratic career advancement, and how scholars have reacted to other approaches. If that position is implausible, further questions follow. How much evidence is there for restricted and sanctioned

Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica

By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and manipulating assertions about a wide variety of matters. Broader definitions of writing that embrace purely semantic devices (semasiography, Sampson 1985:29) relate to ancient systems of communication, especially “Mexican pictography” (Boone 2000:29), but depart from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems reviewed here. Semasiographic definitions are not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems. Their limited applicability to writing systems of the world identifies a typological weakness; even the Mexican examples are inconclusive, since these texts bundle genuine lexical items with supporting graphic devices. An alternative view is that the mixed Mexican pictography contains writing, yet supplements it with effective pictorial clues. From this comes a narrative that is translatable, with some controlled liberties, into language. Equating this distinctive package of features with the preponderantly phonic nature of Egyptian, cuneiform, or Mayan glyphs blurs distinctions. A broad definition of writing does not elucidate these scripts, although it is useful for understanding the relation of texts and accompanying images (Baines 1989; Taube 2000). In part, the first writing attracts attention because it contributes to a teleological narrative of progress (Trigger 1998: 42). The invention of writing is thought, with good justification, to undergird and enable present-day society. In its more developed forms, it is indispensable to bureaucracy, propaganda, and administration.

Practical Religion and Piety

Official religion is presented as centring on royal-divine relations; decorum excludes human non-funerary religious concerns. For want of evidence, pre-New Kingdom personal religion must therefore be approached through constructing hypotheses rather than accumulating evidence. A biographical model suggests that practical religionȔreligious action in an everyday contextȔmay focus on affliction, to which responses include communication with the deadȔletters to the dead among the literateȔand perhaps divination through oracles and consulting seers. These approaches may precede further, unknown actions. The use of intermediaries to deities and the deification of non-royal individuals does not certainly extend beyond the élite. PietyȔpersonal relations with deitiesȔis most clearly attested in personal names, while the élite display of personal religious involvement implies some general aspiration to divine contact. Later Egyptian society, in which practical religion and piety are more visible and integrated, had different rules of decorum and perhaps a different organization, in which values and religious action were less local in their focus.

On the Status and Purposes of Ancient Egyptian Art

No term in the ancient Egyptian language corresponds neatly with Western usages of ‘art’, and Egyptologists have often argued that there is no such thing as ‘Egyptian art’. Yet aesthetically organized structures and artefacts constitute the majority of evidence from Egypt, a legacy created mainly for a small elite. The genres of these materials, all of which had functions additional to the purely aesthetic, are similar to those of many other cultures. They constitute a repository of civilizational values, related to the system of hieroglyphic writing, that was maintained and transmitted across periods. Civilization and artistic style are almost identified with each other. Funerary material constitutes one central context for artistic forms; others are temples and such poorly-preserved locations as palaces. The importance attached to artistic activities in Egypt, high-cultural involvement in them, and idiosyncratic developments can be illustrated from many periods. Egyptian art is a typically inward-looking and almost self-sustaining product of a professional group. It is no less ‘art’ for the wide range of functions and purposes it fulfilled.

Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization

Significance Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history. Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as “Seshat: Global History Databank.” We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.

Merit by Proxy: The Biographies of the Dwarf Djeho and His Patron Tjaiharpta

The Thirtieth Dynasty biography and figure caption on the sarcophagus of the dwarf Djeho (Cairo CG 29307) and a passage from the sarcophagus of the high official Tjaiharpta (CG 29306) are presented in annotated translation. Djehos longer text appears unique in being concerned more with the other-worldly destiny of another person, Tjaiharpta, than with Djeho himself. The two similar hard-stone sarcophagi were buried in a single tomb near the Sarapieion road at Saqqara, together with at least seven other people. The presentation of one persons merits through another is probably connected with Djehos role in dancing at the mortuary ceremonies of the Apis and Mnevis bulls. Among other questions, the find raises issues of royal and non-royal patronage, of the location of tombs, the placing of biographies on sarcophagi, the use of intermediaries before the gods, and the implications of Tjaiharptas partial deference to Djeho in relation to general conceptions of the person.

Egyptian Myth and Discourse: Myth, Gods, and the Early Written and Iconographic Record

FOR decades, a number of Egyptologists have seen the definition and status of myth as one of the most problematic aspects of Egyptian religion and texts. The essential difficulty with the concept of myth has been, on the one hand, the divergence between the ample attestation of many Egyptian deities and groupings of deities, and, on the other hand, the near absence of narratives about the gods that can easily be termed myths. Scholars have questioned the existence of myths in earlier periods and have been perplexed by the variability of mythical motifs. This attitude contrasts with those of students of many ancient cultures and most complex societies, in which myth is seen as a central repository of values, many myths are known in the literary record, and the problem of defining myth may be given a subordinate position.