Texts greatly expand our knowledge of ancient Egypt, but they do not give a full view of the culture. Except for the king, high officials, and other persons of high status, socio-economic information about the majority of Egyptians is generally absent from texts. Egyptians believed in the importance of burial, and the participation of many people in yearly religious festivals is well attested. But the personal beliefs of the peasant farmers and their families are not well known.
Texts do not inform us about how effective the ideology of state religion (and its divine king) was in the lives of the average Egyptian, and this can only be gauged through their complicity and participation in the erection of monuments to the king and state gods. The very largest state projects which still impress us, such as the Great Pyramid at Giza, required the conscription, organization, supplying, feeding, housing, and clothing of thousands of workers. But the political and economic organization of the state was probably a much more significant factor for the marshalling of such a labor force than any ideological zeal of the workers for their god-king, about which we know almost nothing.
Textual information is also dependent on what has been preserved over the millennia. Even in such a dry climate as the deserts to either side of the Nile Valley, organic materials used for writing (papyrus, wooden boards, and linen) were much more fragile than inorganic ones. Texts and monuments were often intentionally erased or destroyed, and it was a frequent practice of later kings to usurp or add to the inscriptions of earlier ones. In postpharaonic times when many sites were abandoned, materials from these sites, including
Artifacts with textual evidence, were sometimes reused or destroyed - such as the systematic destruction of sacred sites by Christians and early Muslims.
Tomb robbing has been common from ancient to modern times. Most of the old Kingdom pyramids were probably robbed after the collapse of the state in the First Intermediate Period, and royal tombs of the New Kingdom were robbed during the 20th Dynasty. unfortunately, tomb robbing has continued into modern times, especially with the rising value of Egyptian artifacts on the international antiquities market. Thus the surviving textual evidence from Egypt, including that of a mortuary nature, is only a very small percentage of what existed at any one period in antiquity.
What textual information has survived is also highly specialized in the information that it conveys. The farther back we go in Egyptian history, the sparser the textual information. Moreover, the early writing, from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd dynasties, is poorly understood. Although the Giza pyramids are examples of the great accomplishments of Egyptian engineers and architects, there are no texts explaining how these buildings were designed or constructed, and most texts from this period have a mortuary context. But clay sealings and pot marks of kings from the earliest dynasties and later periods are often preserved. If carefully excavated, these sealings and pot marks can be used to date the associated archaeological evidence to the reigns of specific kings, and also provide information about administration and ritual.
Beginning with the Middle Kingdom much more textual information is available than from earlier periods, including letters, government records, and literary texts (some of which are only known in surviving copies from later periods). From the new Kingdom, when there is better preservation of stone cult temples and royal mortuary temples, there are many historical inscriptions. These, of course, present a biased and self-serving perspective. For example, the amount of booty and tribute from Egypt’s conquests abroad was often exaggerated. Ideology dictated that the divine king had to be portrayed as victorious in battle, even when that had hardly been the case. Thus historical fact was revised to idealize the role of the king.
Given that so much textual information from ancient Egypt is lost, and archaeological evidence is always fragmentary, it is important that all available evidence be analyzed within the context in which it was found. Textual evidence is not to be understood simply as factual and needs to be interpreted within its historical and archaeological contexts. Texts add information to archaeological investigations that can be obtained in no other way, such as more specific ranges of dates than are possible with radiocarbon dating (see Box 4-B). Inscriptions are found on many types of artifacts, such as scarabs and servant figures (sha-wabti), and the names of kings and high officials are stamped on mud-bricks from some New Kingdom sites. Cartouches of kings can sometimes be identified even on fragmentary reliefs and stelae, or impressed on pottery and seals. Thus texts provide much cultural information (often relevant for dating, as well as more specific information about the site) that would not be available otherwise.
Although they were written for elites, the mortuary texts on the walls of tombs and the religious texts on the walls of temples provide much information about beliefs and cult practices that we would not have solely from archaeological evidence. Along with their accompanying scenes, such texts are high in information content and provide a window into ancient Egyptian ideology.
World History
