Egyptian perspectives on age were ambivalent. Life expectancy was low - most would not live much past their 30s - so for an individual to attain any considerable age was probably rare. Although the ideal age was expressed as 110, and a number of officials are known to, or claim to, have lived past their 70s (Hornung 1992: 59-60), the idea of what constituted old age was probably fluid. Individuals who had adult children (Toivari-Viitala 2001: 207), those with a reduced capacity for work, and/or those physically weakened may have been considered old (Sweeney 2006: 135-6; Janssen and Janssen 2007: 139-41). Old age is desirable in monumental discourse and teachings; prayers and funerary wishes express the hope for a good old age (iAw nfr) with the wisdom and authority of advanced years without associated weakness. Although the Teaching of Ptahhotep expresses conventional ideals of a good old age, it also gives a striking description of age as frailty and illness: ‘‘what age does to people is evil in every respect; the nose is blocked and cannot breathe, because of the difficulty of standing and sitting’’ (Parkinson 1997: 250). A similar ambivalence is evident in representation. Although the image of corpulent maturity expressed an elite male ideal of wealth and authority, more advanced markers of old age such as white hair are uncommon, and often associated with non-elites (exceptions include: Sourouzian 1991; Andreu (ed.) 2002: 49, fig. 25; cf. Janssen and Janssen 2007: 15161). For women, there was no equivalent mature ideal, and images of elderly women are even rarer (Sweeney 2004).
Old age, especially once it reduced the ability to work, entailed a transformation of social position. Those of advanced age became dependent on others and risked social isolation. This could be mitigated for some office-holders through the appointment of a son or assistant as a ‘‘staff of old age’’ to assist in their duties. Evidence for income through pensions or endowments includes the legal text inscribed in the tomb of the Nineteenth Dynasty temple official Samut which bequeaths his property to Mut in return for a type of pension (Frood 2007: 89; see McDowell 1998). Most, however, probably depended on their family or community, although, as Sweeney (2006) argues for women at Deir el-Medina, some avenues for ongoing productivity and contribution may have remained open.
Of all human transitions, death is the one for which we have the greatest material evidence and which appears the most highly ritualized (see Szpakowska ch. 27). Death tears apart social structures and relationships. Such impacts were contained and mitigated through funerary preparation, rituals, and the mortuary cult, all of which are manifest, mainly for the elite, in the materiality of bodily practices, burial goods, and the tomb. All of these had economic costs, both in the short term for mortuary equipment (e. g. Cooney 2007) and in the longer term for maintenance of the mortuary cult, for which elaborate endowments could be made (e. g. Reisner 1918; Spalinger 1985). Social management of death has been viewed cross-culturally and for Egypt in three key stages: separation, recovery, and maintenance (Lloyd 1989: 124-31; Meskell 2002: 182). The first phase centered on the preparation of the body and the assimilation of loss through public expression of grief: ‘‘I and my people wept sorely for you in my quarter. I donated clothing of fine linen to wrap you in and had many clothes made’’ (Wente 1990: 217). Grief is most powerfully expressed, usually by women, in tomb scenes of mourners and in laments. Such images and texts are among the few components of tomb decoration which focus on the experience of the living in relation to the dead.
The funeral and the ritual performances surrounding it began to heal the rift among the living and effected the transfiguration and ‘‘recovery’’ of the deceased (e. g. Szpakowska 2008: 182-99; Wilson 1944). This recovery enabled the integration of the deceased into a new social world comparable to that on earth (Assmann 2005: 58-63): a late Old Kingdom letter to a deceased father evokes the city of the dead where the recipient is imagined as having scribes at hand to assist in litigation on behalf of his surviving family (Gardiner and Sethe 1928: 4; Wente 1990: 212). The final phase, the mortuary cult, ensured both the afterlife of the deceased and the maintenance of social memory, if only for a generation or two (Baines and Lacovara 2002; Meskell 2002: 202-7). Traditions and norms of inheritance were also mechanisms for reordering a shattered world, but they remained flexible and open to dispute. The recent dead remained part of the ordered cosmos through the cult and could intervene both malevolently and positively in the world of the living, as evidenced by letters to the dead (Wente 1990: 210-20) which often deal with inheritance issues. As Meskell (2002: 203) notes, ‘‘the dead kept the living in line.’’
World History
