Demotic Dictionary Project

When people think of ancient Egypt, they tend to think of temples and tombs decorated with hieroglyphs and of rich and powerful rulers controlling all aspects of the lives of their subjects. Since the draft manuscript that I have been checking this year included the letter P, and since the letter P includes a word for king, I thought it might be interesting to think about the phrases and titles of officials that include this word for king. But first a short digression on the word itself. The normal word used in Demotic texts for "king" is Pr> (pronounced "per o" or something similar), the source for our word pharaoh. The Egyptian term means, literally, "great house," and was originally used of the king's palace. It soon came to be used to refer to the king himself, much as the term "White House" can be used to refer to the President of the United States. Once the term came to mean "king" rather than "palace," a new term was developed for palace: pr Pr>\ i.e., "house of pharaoh." The "house of pharaoh" was the place where many important government officials (shn.w Pr>) worked. Some officials included the word Pr> in their titles, where the term seems to correspond to the adjective "royal"; e.g., "royal agent (rt)," (a person who, among other things, "inspects ... the temples" on behalf of the central government) or "royal account scribe" and "royal audit scribe." The seemingly more general title "royal scribe" corresponds to the Greek title PocoiAiKdq ypaji|LiaT8'6q, officials who are known to have had charge of the financial affairs of individual nomes. The title "royal farmer" indicated a farmer working state-owned land; there was some status involved in being a "royal" farmer and the state provided such farmers with special protection (against, e.g., impressment by corrupt local officials) in order to ensure that the farmers were available