Deborah Sweeney Boeken

This book investigates how ancient Egyptians expressed questions, requests, information and complaints in letters from the Late Ramesside Period. Correspondents formulated their contributions in reply to their addressee’s letter and/or in anticipation of their next, thus creating a dialogue over time and space. Extracts from earlier letters were often quoted when replying or reacting to them, so we can detect how different Egyptians replied to questions and complaints, reacted to information, agreed to undertake commissions or attempted to avoid them. These replies and responses from correspondence are compared and contrasted with the replies to questions, requests, information and complaints preserved in the summaries of conversations in legal texts and other contemporary non-legal documents. The final chapter deals with courtesy in ancient Egyptian letter-writing, exploring how it was maximised and minimised between correspondents of equal or unequal social standing, of varying degrees of intimacy, and in situations where greater or lesser concessions were required from the addressee.