Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara

<p>This thesis investigates the distinctive ways in which personal names were integrated into the textual and iconographic programme of an ancient Egyptian funerary complex: that of 6th Dynasty vizier Mereruka Meri and his family. The name (rn) was a principal part of the ancient Egyptian pers...

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Main Author: Hamilton, JCF
Other Authors: Frood, E
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
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author Hamilton, JCF
author2 Frood, E
author_facet Frood, E
Hamilton, JCF
author_sort Hamilton, JCF
collection OXFORD
description <p>This thesis investigates the distinctive ways in which personal names were integrated into the textual and iconographic programme of an ancient Egyptian funerary complex: that of 6th Dynasty vizier Mereruka Meri and his family. The name (rn) was a principal part of the ancient Egyptian person—which also incorporated the body, heart, the kA, and the bA—and the tomb was the primary site for the monumental memorialisation of these aspects of the self. In the context of the ancient Egyptian tomb, the survival of the name was achieved through inscribing it in stone and reaffirming it in speech, thus ensuring that the essence of the deceased lived in the memory of others. The tomb was also a site in which dependants and people associated with the deceased had their names memorialised, either as named figures which were part of the planned reliefs, or which were added (in the manner of ‘graffiti’) to the reliefs sometime after the completion of the tomb’s decoration. This thesis approaches Old Kingdom onomastics from a socio-linguistic and anthropological perspective. The primary enquiry that this thesis seeks to address is how a name’s meaning was materialised in an ancient Egyptian commemorative monument. This is achieved, firstly, by examining the possible meanings in names themselves, with careful attention to the ways in which names communicated the social, geographic, and temporal context (‘deixis’) of their referents. It is secondly achieved through studying the ways in which inscribed names were situationally embedded and contextually bound by the wider visual and architectural setting of the tomb space. Ultimately, I argue that the meanings and orthographies of ancient Egyptian personal names were affected by the ritual space(s) in which they were inscribed.</p>
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spelling oxford-uuid:d6049d74-865b-4ef8-91d1-1d41c00511082023-05-04T10:26:56ZBeloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at SaqqaraThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:d6049d74-865b-4ef8-91d1-1d41c0051108OnomasticsGraffitiOld Kingdom EgyptSaqqaraEnglishHyrax Deposit2019Hamilton, JCFFrood, EParkinson, R<p>This thesis investigates the distinctive ways in which personal names were integrated into the textual and iconographic programme of an ancient Egyptian funerary complex: that of 6th Dynasty vizier Mereruka Meri and his family. The name (rn) was a principal part of the ancient Egyptian person—which also incorporated the body, heart, the kA, and the bA—and the tomb was the primary site for the monumental memorialisation of these aspects of the self. In the context of the ancient Egyptian tomb, the survival of the name was achieved through inscribing it in stone and reaffirming it in speech, thus ensuring that the essence of the deceased lived in the memory of others. The tomb was also a site in which dependants and people associated with the deceased had their names memorialised, either as named figures which were part of the planned reliefs, or which were added (in the manner of ‘graffiti’) to the reliefs sometime after the completion of the tomb’s decoration. This thesis approaches Old Kingdom onomastics from a socio-linguistic and anthropological perspective. The primary enquiry that this thesis seeks to address is how a name’s meaning was materialised in an ancient Egyptian commemorative monument. This is achieved, firstly, by examining the possible meanings in names themselves, with careful attention to the ways in which names communicated the social, geographic, and temporal context (‘deixis’) of their referents. It is secondly achieved through studying the ways in which inscribed names were situationally embedded and contextually bound by the wider visual and architectural setting of the tomb space. Ultimately, I argue that the meanings and orthographies of ancient Egyptian personal names were affected by the ritual space(s) in which they were inscribed.</p>
spellingShingle Onomastics
Graffiti
Old Kingdom Egypt
Saqqara
Hamilton, JCF
Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
title Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
title_full Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
title_fullStr Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
title_full_unstemmed Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
title_short Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
title_sort beloved of the ka personal names in the complex of mereruka meri at saqqara
topic Onomastics
Graffiti
Old Kingdom Egypt
Saqqara
work_keys_str_mv AT hamiltonjcf belovedofthekapersonalnamesinthecomplexofmererukameriatsaqqara