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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 present 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 studies 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.
