On the use of some social terms in ancient Egyptian twelfth dynasty writing

From the reign of Senwosret I and up to the end of the Twelfth dynasty, the social terms SwAw «(indigent) migrant», Abt «extended family household», «clan», wHyt «clan», «village» and the noun nDs, used mostly in the sense of «fine young man» and «socially weak man», disappeared from the active vocabulary of Egyptian writing. This may have been caused by the shift of Egyptian writing from the «individual» and «private» system of values typical of the First Intermediate Period to a system of values most pleasing to a highly centralized bureaucratic monarchy and divine kingship. Themes and social notions which were at variance with the ideology of this monarchy were to be avoided in tomb inscriptions which now make up the lion share of our written sources on the period in question. The unprecedented and all-encompassing dominance of kingship in the area of writing on stone narrowed considerably the opportunities for the person to praise himself in an autobiography: the choice of «appropriate» topics became too limited. This can be one of the reasons for noticeable decrease in the stream of autobiographies after Senwosret I, and for the coming forth of such forms of self-immortalization as temple statues and stelae in Abydos.