Limits to the written evidence

Writings convey mainly the interests of the writer, and in a part-literate society, this introduces a clear social bias. For their own conscience or for public image, the powerful may say they (would like to) protect vulnerable, without necessarily taking action. Conscience, public or private, can also be too easily satisfied by single or limited actions, with no impact on the overall social problem. Indeed, limited action may operate precisely as a strategy to avoid the issue of change. Historically, paternalism does not enforce good governance, but instead highlights the gaps between what people say and what they do; for example, the shift from taxation to voluntary charity brings a collapse in support of public works in the late Roman Empire. The literary and religious writing can be tested against those other areas of written evidence, such as the legal, where past people themselves protested against injustices. All writings, though, remain within relatively narrow social horizons. Therefore, archaeological survey and excavation are needed to provide a broader socioeconomic history, within which to set the claims in ancient writing.

The teachings are particularly useful in exposing limits in writing, because they take the model of father teaching son, an extreme gender bias. One test for our own imagination of the past, and use of past writings, would be to construct a teaching of a mother for her daughter. Gender bias is not the only restriction on visibility of the ancient society. Kinship by blood or marriage, particularly the nuclear family, is not necessarily the primary, certainly not the only, association between individuals in a society: the orphan and the work colleague are both well attested in ancient writings, and neither would neatly fit the family model. Just taking the most common Egyptian family terms—father, mother, sister, brother, husband, and wife— the teachings remain extraordinarily restrictive, even allowing for normative associations of age and gender in literary writing. The six terms allow a range of 14 speech relations, each open to its own learning and teaching:

The gaps can only partly be filled from the written record, from ancient letters, where we can find sisters advising one another or sons writing to their mothers (Wente 1990). There are also the legal cases previously considered, where daughter can contest father, adding in effect a negative instruction to the family picture. A father-son model is, evidently, a literary fiction, allowing a past or completed world of experience to inform a present and future, or incomplete, open world of human choice. In those terms, the major omission in the literary model is gender. Too many other social relations may be too easily overlooked, by both the ancient and the modern readers of teachings. Sociologists might ask whether that is not one implicit function of the literary teaching, intended or not.