title: The Conceptualisation, Expression, and Social Context of Friendship in Egypt from the Old to the Middle Kingdom
Creators: name: Sargent, Charlotte
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2028

description: The primary aim of this thesis is to understand whether friendship relationships existed in ancient Egyptian society through an examination of the xnms, aq-jb, aqw, mHnk, and rHw designations. Within Egyptology, there has been little discussion of friendship. There is no overarching analysis of friendship across the history, social classes, or sources of ancient Egypt. Nevertheless, friendship and friendship elements are found to significantly influence and interact with other social networks (e.g. hierarchical, professional, familial). The underemphasised workings and place of friendship in ancient Egyptian society are analysed here to build a more complete picture of social networking and interaction. Firstly, I use anthropological studies of friendships across different cultures to create a working definition of friendship as a social phenomenon. Friendship is here understood as a relationship between two or more people which is not primarily defined by consanguineous, marital, or sexual relations existing on a spectrum of free choice, based on personal affinity, to a socio-economic relationship of obligation that in its social contextualisation can compare with kinship types of obligation. While it is an ideally voluntary, non-permanent relationship, these ideological features are often not found in reality. Secondly, I identify specific lexemes that present some (or all) of the identified characteristics of friendship. The chosen lexemes include xnms, aq-jb, aqw, mHnk, and rHw, with the primary focus of the thesis being xnms given that it is the most commonly and widely attested term. Thirdly, I approach these social phenomena in their unique cultural context through their expression in Egyptian language and written sources from the Old Kingdom through to the end of the Middle Kingdom. This analysis is grounded in a close reading of the primary written sources, anthropological approaches to friendship, and cognitive linguistic theory. I analyse the presentation of the xnms, aq-jb, aqw, mHnk, and rHw relationships and assess whether we can reasonably classify them as ‘friendships’. xnms is determined to be a friendship relationship where affective, emotional expression and behaviour is common. Funerary obligations are inherent to the xnms-relationship, and it is also shown to be a highly variable relationship which crosses the fuzzy boundaries of social categorisation. The designation of aq-jb is focused on the elite circle of court officials with the king acting as ego. Central concepts to the aq-jb-relationship are trust and intimacy developed out of shared childhood development and physical access. The function of the aqw-relationship is similarly based around the concept of access and the term is used in the contexts of having intimate access to the king and elites and having physical access to household spaces as a servant. The mHnk-relationship is an example of a patronage-based relationship with an emotional element (expressed through mry =f). The mHnk-person acts as the client with the king or elite official acting as patron of artisanal craft production. In return for fulfilling funerary obligations for the deceased ego, the mHnk-people are rewarded with commemoration, tomb goods, and security. Finally, rHw is consistently shown to be an informal term of address used conversationally within groups of labourers. Through the analysis of the chosen lexemes, I demonstrate that these social relationships comprised varied forms of friendship and friendship behaviours in ancient Egyptian society.