Problems in Egyptology

Abstract

Egyptologists have produced vast amounts of data on various aspects of the ancient Egyptian society. This information has primarily been developed from ancient Egypt's archaeological and textual records. Egyptologists believe that the data (archaeological and textual records) provide the answers to any questions surrounding ancient Egyptian society; they need only to be translated or excavated (Trigger, 1993, p. 2).1 Because Egyptology is a combination of archaeology, philology, and linguistics, the interpretation of these data has been of great interest to other disciplines. From the archaeological and textual records, numerous studies have been produced on certain aspects of ancient Egyptian society, marriage, family, women, sexual life, and customs. But these studies deal with kinship in an allusive manner. In 1927, Murray published an article titled Genealogies of the Middle Kingdom in the journal Ancient Egypt. This article is often cited to give credibility to the popular albeit erroneous assumption that ancient Egypt (pharaonic) was rampant with consanguineous marriages, that is, brother-sister and father-daughter. Indeed, what this article illustrated was Murray's unfamiliarity with the indigenous meaning of ancient Egyptian kinship terms. Consequently, Murray (1927) disposes of the idea that kinship terms such as snt (sister) and hit (wife) may have different cultural connotations than those of Europe. Murray states emphatically,