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

Thesis

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.

Authors: Hamilton, JCF

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aqypor178
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: funerary inscriptions; personal names; graffiti; veneration; socio-onomastics; materiality; onomastics; names; Old Kingdom; Saqqara
• Subjects: Old Kingdom Egypt; Onomastics; Graffiti; Saqqara