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he titles wh? nswt ‘royal wb?’ and wdpw nswt
‘royal wdpw’: their function and their holders
II.1. PERSONAL BACKGROUND OF THE OFFICIALS
The available sources reveal only limited information about the personal background
of the ‘royal wb3s’ and ‘royal wdpws’ such as their family relationships or place of origin.
A temporal division can be observed among the sources regarding the types of informa¬
tion they provide, and which division derives from the difference between the types of
the sources themselves dated to each period. Data concerning family members of the
officials are mentioned more often from the 18" dynasty from the period of which the
sources contain tombs, funerary objects or monuments for personal use, while during
the later period of the New Kingdom the available sources are rather of a monumental
and — especially in the 20" dynasty — administrative nature which understandably avoid
giving personal details of individuals involved. On the other hand, sources from the
Ramesside period provide more information about the foreign origin of certain officials
than in earlier times, however, indications are mostly based on only the name of the
person, which implies that they are not native Egyptian.
IL.1.1. Genealogy and family relationships
Naming or mentioning family members on the monuments of the ‘royal wb3s’ and ‘royal
wdpws’ does not seem to be frequent compared to the total number of the individuals
presented in the corpus since any sort of relative is known only from twenty-nine officials
out of the one hundred and two. However, if one takes into consideration the different
nature of the sources during the 18" and the 19-20" dynasties respectively that was
mentioned earlier, the number of times family members are mentioned by name becomes
more understandable: eighteen cases out of twenty-seven individuals from the 18" dy¬
nasty, seven cases out of twenty-seven individuals from the 19" dynasty, three cases out