Erin's response

It seems my response will be considerably less erudite, and considerably more Egypto-centric, than Tom’s. These are just two major points which inspired my attempts to think about our readings in relation to MY civilization (nyah!).

One: The notion of harnessing language in the legitimation of state that was brought up in our discussion touched upon something that had been going through my mind while doing the readings. Our ideas about spoken language in ancient Egypt are obviously tempered by the writing system – but there is a major problem in thinking about language at the emergent point of the state (as Egyptologists like to think about it, i.e. the origin of the dynastic system). Textual evidence jumps pretty drastically from proper nouns and lists (mostly used in labelling – objects, tombs, etc.) in the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods (3500-3000), to a fully fleshed out writing system in in the Early Old Kingdom (think about 2600). (Perhaps the real development of the writing system happened in a cave in the desert with one particular Einstein-hotep working it out and apprenticing some other frizzy-hairs, or perhaps the bulk of the development was recorded on perishable materials. In any case…)

Egyptian texts do show dialectal differences but these don’t really begin to appear in the texts until the late Old Kingdom/First Intermediate Period (around 2200). This would make me think that there is a sort of “state dialect” being imposed upon the scribal population that only begins to be discarded when state control falters. But this doesn’t tell us if the imposition of such an official dialect occurred in conjunction with other factors affecting the development of the state. I particularly like the idea that it did though, for reasons I’ll mention in a minute. The writing system first appears in Upper Egypt, so one might speculate (and so I suppose I will) that the writing system reflects the Upper Egyptian dialect. This would seem to be a natural dialect to adopt as the official one, since early state control seems to have centered in that general region.

But I wonder if the issue is not so much dialectal… Modern Egyptian Arabic has a drastic divide between the northern (mostly Cairene) and southern dialects, so much so that they are practically mutually unintelligible (a problem somewhat mitigated today by radio and television…the programs are in Cairene so most Upper Egyptians can understand, if not reproduce the northern dialect – great for the Giza archaeologist, no? - sorry, that was quite the tangent). And until the events immediately leading to “unification”, the contact between the Upper and Lower Egyptian cultures seems to be pretty minimal, in spite of the superhighway that is the Nile. So it seems that just because people are readily capable of moving up and down the Nile, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will do so, and then interact and integrate (?). So, I wonder if the northern Egyptians weren’t speaking a more semitically-inclined language than the language we’ve received (more heavily influenced by north-central African languages than Semitic). If they were, then the imposition of an official language was considerably more drastic, and perhaps a very nice example of a dominant ideology subjugating the masses, eh? (even if penetration into the spoken language of the laity was slow in coming). I don’t think this is actually going anywhere; it just struck me, I guess.

In repsonse to Ömür’s talk of spectacle associated with kingship affecting the state of the state, as it were, I’m not going to be terribly much help. I’ve done some poking about, but I can only come up with one ritual/spectacle that seems to really correspond to his example. That is the coronation of the new king, which I’d mentioned in class, but my brain apparently wasn’t capable of describing in any coherent fashion at the time.

The coronation ritual is the occasion when the king officially becomes an incarnation of the deity (Horus, or Osiris, depending on the time period and who you read.) Under the rule of a king, Egypt exists in a state of order. When that king dies, there is an interregnum during which the king’s body is prepared for burial. The new king is not crowned until the dead king is in the ground (with some exceptions, mostly early prehumous (is that a word?) coronation of the new king due to coregencies). During the interregnum, a possibility for chaos to consume the land exists. This is beyond terrifying for the Egyptians, so the coronation of the new king is a collective sigh of relief that order is reestablished/reinforced for the duration of the new king’s life. So the king’s own physical state is a reflection of the state of the kingdom.

This concept is perhaps reinforced by the Sed-festival, which is essentially a jubilee celebrated by a king upon reaching a particularly significant length of reign. He is required to run a circuit around two markers in a courtyard several times, to prove his stamina and, therefore, his ability to continue reigning effectively for a considerable time to come, thereby staving off chaos, I suppose.

(Later rituals, including the confirmation of the king’s legitimacy during the Opet festival, might also fall into this category: the king is transformed into an actual deity on earth (no longer just a mortal incarnation of the deity), and is thus ensuring the stability of truth, justice, and the Egyptian way of life.)