Social Hierarchy in the 'Satire of the Trades': Scribal Considerations on Crafts in Ancient Egypt

By Simon Thuault

This short study of how the various trades of the Teaching of Khety are described and how they are depicted in other sources show that the contents of the Satire are mostly focused on tasks and gestures not always relevant regarding actual chaînes opératoires, but useful in order to convey the global emphasis of the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicanor Books
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781838118075

Book preview

Introduction

The Teaching of Khety (Satire of the Trades)¹ has been until now extensively studied and commented, and a great number of questions still remain about its composition², its contents, and even its author. The text is attested on dozens of ostraca and a few papyri, mostly dated from New Kingdom³. The present study lies mainly on the version from papyrus Sallier II (abbr. pSallier) because of its apparent completeness. But this version being quite mediocre and full of badly rendered expressions, number of comparisons with other occurrences have been done in order to get an optimal understanding of the text⁴.

Regarding previous studies on the Teaching of Khety, it would be tedious to draw a complete list of it, but some of these have been of major interest for the present work⁵: van de Walle (1947), Guglielmi (1994), Roccati (2000), Vernus (2010), Mathieu (2001), Jäger (2004), and more recently Jurjens (2021). Mathieu (2001) is by the way one of the rare studies dealing with the hierarchy conveyed by the text, trying to find a logic through the repartition of the depicted professions (p.68):

"On n’a pas réussi à ce jour à déceler un principe d’explication logique de l’ordre de représentation des vingt professions énumérées (21 avec celle de scribe), même si l’on a déjà proposé, sans conviction, d’y voir une succession de spécialistes, puis de généralistes, ou un classement « plus ou moins hiérarchique"

Comparing the list of crafts in the Satire with other related texts like the Onomasticon of Amenemope, the author gives a comparative table of professions and tries to see if some conclusions can be drawn after these data (p.72):

"On est fondé à déduire de ce classement que la liste de la Satire place en tête des professions qui étaient considérées par les Égyptiens comme plus spécialisées, et par conséquent, à ce titre, comme socialement mieux qualifiées, à savoir le sculpteur, le fondeur, le forgeron, l’artisan-menuisier et le tailleur de pierres"

Following Mathieu, the social hierarchy spread by the Teaching of Khety would follow a top-down classification, the most considered professions being at the top of the list, the less considered at the bottom (namely fowler and fisher). These most belittled jobs are thus "à l’opposé exact de la culture scribale dont Khéty […] se fait dans son Enseignement le thuriféraire paternaliste" (Mathieu 2001: 72).

Van de Walle (1947: 55–6) was more doubtful regarding this hierarchy, explaining that:

"Pour autant que nous puissions en juger, le satiriste égyptien qui fait défiler devant nous le cortège bariolé des corps de métier n’a pas manifesté au même point la préoccupation de suivre une gradation rigoureuse. Cependant nous croyons reconnaître dans l’énumération des différentes classes d’artisans un certain souci de groupement idéologique"

This excerpt shows that the author considers a possible logical classification in the text, but remains sceptical. The same impression stands out from Roccati’s study (2000: 6–8):

"Les activités les plus importantes, qu’on veut ridiculiser, correspondent en réalité à celles de techniciens, car c’est avec le rôle de technicien que la fonction de scribe, proposée par l’auteur, doit rivaliser. […] Ce n’est qu’en apparence que tous les métiers évoqués dans la Satire sont rangés d’un point de vue professionnel, et non social. […] La séquence des occupations n’est pas sans suggérer quelque ordre social, selon un mouvement descendant, les activités de spécialistes précédant celles qui étaient exercées par la plupart des gens – tels les paysans, comprenant beaucoup d’étrangers – mais qui étaient ressenties comme moins intéressantes"

Finally, Guglielmi (1994: 45 and n.6) identifies two ways of explaining the hierarchy in Khety. The first is linked (1) to the material used by every craftsman or (2) to the place they are actually working in: (1) "wertvoll (wood and metal) and schmutzigen (mud and clay); (2) work in the field, abroad, and in water. The second (and not much convincing) explanation is linked to literary devices used by the author, namely the phonetic connection between the end of the barber chapter (§7,3) and the beginning of the reed-cutter" one (§8,1): bj.t, bee <> bṯjw, reed-gatherer.

In short, most of the previous studies dedicated to the Teaching of Khety suppose a sort of logical hierarchy in the listed crafts without being able to define it clearly and to explain the reasons of this classification. But there is at least one reason that can explain this lack of precise understanding: most of these works focus only on the contents of the Satire and on comparative texts. There is no extensive study of each craft, neither any comparison with other textual and iconographical sources outside of wisdom and teaching literature.

This is one of the aims of the present book. Thanks to a substantial database of Middle Bronze Age⁶ textual and iconographical sources related to craftsmen and their activities, I intend to give new insights on the list of professions of the Teaching of Khety: is the order conveyed by the text relevant in regard of Egyptian society? Can we draw another (or adapted) hierarchy of the listed professions following the available data?

Moreover, beyond the hierarchical issue, other questions arise. Are the objects and activities described in the Satire coherent with archaeological and iconographical remains? Can we explain the author’s choices regarding each part of the depicted jobs in the text? Do these choices fit with what we know about jobs’ reality?

The abovementioned database has been made in the course of the PROCESS Project held by Università di Pisa and headed by Prof. Gianluca Miniaci⁷. This project aims at shedding new lights on Egyptian crafts and social history, from analyses of objects and marks let by workers to textual and iconographical remains dealing with craftsmen and lower social strata in general. So, the creation of a database gathering this information has been of major interest for the realisation of the project.

Except for individual publications, the fulfilment of the database has been possible thanks to several previous extensive works like Meketre⁸ and Person and Names of the Middle Kingdom (PNM)⁹. At this time (03/2022), my own database compiles 287 individual objects and monuments, gathering more than 600 attestations of workers and activities considered as non-elite (in the usual sense given to this expression in Egyptological literature¹⁰). The occurrences there considered offer a great diversity of supports and contexts: funerary objects (e.g. masks and furniture), papyri and ostraca, rock inscriptions (mostly from mines and carries), seals, statues, stelas, and tomb decoration.

This variety allows comparing attestations of a same activity (even in some cases of same persons) through several contexts whose primary objectives can be different, thus giving various interpretations of the related craft(s) and/or worker(s). For example, a private stela from a potter and his family can offer different information about their social position than a depiction of the same person in the tomb of a high courtier. Likewise, a papyrus bearing a list of remunerations and wages can’t be interpreted in the same manner as a royal stela depicting craftsmen involved into an official work.

This book is divided into two parts. The first one is dedicated to the list of works included in the Satire. Thanks to comparisons with parallel texts and data gathered in the abovementioned database, I will expose the common points and divergences between the hierarchy drawn in Khety and what we know about the classification of crafts in Ancient Egyptian society during Middle Bronze Age.

Then, in the second part, I focus on the way these various jobs are described in the text, that is to say the activities and objects mentioned as representative of each work (and connected to what we usually call "chaîne opératoire"). We will see if these descriptions are also relevant, and which parts of the text can be identified as literary emphasis, deliberate choices, etc.

To sum up, this extensive study on the Teaching of Khety intends to offer a multimodal view on this already well studied text. There hasn’t been, until now, any analysis combining and comparing the linguistic and philological contents of the text with archaeological remains and, at the same time, the rest of the epigraphical and iconographical data of Middle Kingdom. Usually, the Satire of the Trades has been studied in the light of its impact on our understanding of the scribal practice and worldview. It is now possible, thanks to the gathering of a substantial amount of data, to offer new insights into the social reality the text conveys, and into the potential distortions done by the scribe in order to spread his Weltanschauung.

¹ In the following pages, both labels will be used in order to avoid repetitions (although the name Teaching of Khety is preferred).

² One of the major issues being the date of its creation. Traditionally placed during the Middle Kingdom, especially during the Twelfth Dynasty, the writing of the Teaching of Khety still remains imprecisely dated. This question largely exceeds the present research and won’t be dealt here. For a substantial work about the dating of the Satire, see Widmaier (2013).

³ About the numerous versions of the Teaching of Khety, see Vernus (2010: 239-240). For a detailed recension of it, see JÄGER (2004) and WIDMAIER (2013: 506).

⁴ Mostly ostracon DeM 1043+1049, oDeM 1014 II, oGeneva 12551, pAnastasi VII, shelf Louvre 693 (abbr. tLouvre), oPetrie 27 and oBM EA 65943.

⁵ For a substantial recension of the bibliography devoted to the Satire of the Trades, see MATHIEU (1998).

⁶ Including First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom.

⁷ https://egittologia.cfs.unipi.it/it/ricerca/process-pharaonic-rescission-objects-as-crucibles-of-ancient-egyptian-societies/ .

⁸ https://meketre.org .

⁹ https://pnm.uni-mainz.de/info .

¹⁰ Thus excluding directors, supervisors and chiefs in general.

FIRST PART: the Teaching of Khety and its trades’ hierarchy

The listed crafts and their social reality

1, Translation of the Teaching of Khety

Despite a great number of translations and commentaries, some parts of the Teaching of Khety remain difficult to apprehend. Even though comparisons between sources allow us to notice the potential mistakes of badly copied versions (like pSallier), grammatical and lexical analysis still leave a lot of questions unanswered.

The following translation lean on previous ones, with special interest in those of Hoch (1991– 1992), Vernus (2010), Jäger (2004) and Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae. Hieroglyphs and transliteration are based on the best-preserved version, the one of pSallier¹¹, revised and edited thanks to other sources that allow to better understand unclear sections and contents in general¹².

My focus in the present study being on crafts and their description, I don’t include into this translation the parts devoted to scribal practice and emphasis about the advantages of this job and position (§1,1-3,6 and §22,1-30,6). Moreover, these parts rather belong to the so-called wisdom than satiric literature¹³ and deserve a dedicated study.

The following punctuation is used:

() = non-written phonograms that can be useful for the understanding of the related lemma

{} = written form considered as erroneous or