Meaningful Pasts: On Social Logics and Conceptions of Time in Ancient Egypt

Abstract

If kinship and the state can have an impact on the social creation of the past, ancient Egypt offers a doubly interesting case, because in historical terms both the dominant presence of the state logic can be observed and its coexistence with another, more ancient social logic related to kinship. Indeed, the advent of the state in the late fourth millennium BC seems to have subsumed but not to have suppressed the existing mode of social organization, focused on kinship. Is it possible to identify the central features of the past as it was perceived by the ancient Egyptians, in relation to the influence of these social logics' to consider the question, I propose a deliberately broad approach with regard to time-span (from the Predynastic Period to the New Kingdom, see Chronological Table), to genres of texts (from instructions and funerary autobiographies to king-lists and the Pyramid Texts), and to contexts (royal and "private"). While such a perspective inevitably blurs detailed variations, what is important here is to define the most basic features of the influence that kinship and the state may have had in the formulation of the past in ancient Egypt. Therefore, the broader the approach, the more potential there is for defining these features.