ABSTRACT
Among the civilizations of the ancient world, Egypt stands out as a culture with a keen sense of its exceptional historical depth: references to past people or events abound both in visual and in written records, and we can generally say that in many aspects of their social life Egyptians looked at their history as a source of political or intellectual legitimation (Baines and Yoffee 1998: 212–225). Whether in the sense of modelling one’s present actions upon the memory of the past (Vernus 1995: 35–54) or in the sense of stressing one’s own achievements against the background of tradition (Vernus 1995: 54–121), one can argue that Ancient Egypt conforms to the cultural historical generalization that literate cultures tend to ascribe canonical status to individuals or events perpetuated in a fixed written record (Assmann 1992: 93–97). Yet, classical Egypt did not know a genuine discourse of history (Assmann 1996: 15–38), a ‘historiography’ written by individual authors comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides who project to the study of the past their own intellectual agenda (Hunter 1982: 3–13; Schadewaldt 1982: 113–119, 275–283): much like the transmission of literary works, the knowledge of the past was an important component of the elites’ cultural identity, but the study of the historical and literary past privileged timeless paradigms of political function or intellectual prestige over contextualized, concrete examples of individual achievement. This is why, for example, Egyptian annals, king lists or priestly genealogies consist of chronologically organized but semantically repetitive sequences of names and deeds (von Beckerath 1997: 13–31; Redford 1986a: 1–96), or the names of classical literary authors tend to function as pseudepigraphic referents (Loprieno 1996a: 225–226).
