Seite 21 [21]
of them, which might imply the ruler’s loss of trust in the native members of the upper
echelons. However, he also drew conclusions based on only a certain number of officials
who were known to him without taking into consideration many of the representatives
of the office whose presence might have influenced his statements. Nevertheless, in spite
of the corpus being lacking that formed the basis of their examinations, as well as the
generality of their conclusions, both the studies by Helck and Schulman were pioneer
works in this subject and provided a firm basis for further research.
Furthermore, other researchers are worthy of note whose work also supported the pre¬
sent study. Gessler-Lohr approached the subject of the officials from an art historical
perspective as she focused on dating certain individuals based on the stylistic criteria of
their monuments during the 18" dynasty,’ such work having been remarkably useful in
cases when there is no other primary reference to when a person lived. Malek, similarly to
Schulman, also chose particular officials from the Ramesside period as the topic of two of
his studies,* in the course of which he briefly analysed the organization of the burials of
these officials within the Saqqara necropolis. Gregersen intended to clarify the distinction
of the words wb3 and wdpw regarding their writing as well as their usage,’ however, apart
from some correct statements, the fundamental methodological mistake of her work is
that she drew her conclusions purely based on the orthographical appearances of both
words without taking the textual context into consideration in which they were represented
and the corpus of her examination was only a limited number of occurrences, the choice
of which is unknown. Due to these facts, her conclusions are unfortunately not convincing
and supported enough, and some of them are even erroneous.
The main aim of the present work is to determine the place and duties of the wb3 nswt
‘royal wb?’ and wdpw nswt ‘royal wdpw’ officials in the personal service of the ruler as
well as in the administrative system of the New Kingdom, to provide a more detailed
picture of their function and significance based on the conceptions that previous stud¬
ies have implied, and also to examine the background of their dependency on the ruler
and the role they fulfilled in the executive power. A similarly important aim of the research
is to clarify the distinction between the two titles — wb3 nswt and wdpw nswt — in regard
to their reading as well as their usage, since the literature so far — studies as well as
vocabularies — mainly used the two titles quasi randomly or merged one into the other
lack a firm basis for their correct interpretation.
3 Gessler-Léhr, 1989, 1990.
* Malek, 1985, 1988.
> Gregersen, 2007.