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Such special commissions were different matters regarding the cult statues of the ruler,
mining and guarrying expedítions, inspections concerning the working progress of royal
tombs and dealing with various affairs of the workmen at Deir el-Medina, as well as
acting as members of the judiciary in legal matters.
The reason in the background of this obvious change in the nature of the duties and
the widening of the responsibilities of the officials between the 18" and the 19" dynasties
might be explained by Schulman’s theory concerning the lurch of the reliance of the
king in the native members of the upper echelons.’” The ruler needed his own trusted
men to be loyal exclusively and unquestionably to him, as far as could be possible at
least, thus his choice for one of the officials performing the most confidential service
around him seems to be reasonable. Nevertheless, it must be noted here again that the
distribution of the officials’ duties throughout the period is based on the information
from the available sources and not the result of an analysis of a complete corpus, addi¬
tional evidence may therefore change the present conclusions.
11.5.1, Representations of duties in the tomb depictions
The exact location of the tombs of ‘royal wb3s’ is known only in sixteen cases,” and the
number of them that provide us with information about the duties of these officials is
even fewer. The pictorial wall decorations represent the individuals during their official
tasks as ‘royal wb?’ only in five tombs, all of them from the 18" dynasty, while three of
them are dated to the time of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, the other two tombs are
from the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. In all the other cases, textual materials
serve as further points of reference regarding the scope of duties of these persons.
mentions the participation of the officials in the legal matter of the harem conspiracy. These claims
can be neither supported nor contradicted, however, as for the knowledge of foreign languages, it is
questionable to what extent they were able to preserve their mother tongue in a foreign society, es¬
pecially if they had lived there for several generations. Concerning the second claim about their
theoretically being unbiased, it must be noted that the number of the officials with a proven or
presumed foreign background was not in the majority compared to those with a native Egyptian one,
who also were members of the judiciary in other legal cases, thus the assumed reason for choosing
an official of foreign origin in certain assignments are not valid in this respect. For a discussion on
the issue of the officials’ foreign origin, see chapter Il.ı.2. on p. 42.
703 Schulman, 1986, 198-199. For a detailed discussion on his theory, see chapter II.1.2. The issue of
foreign origin of the officials on p. 42.
704 For a detailed discussion on the officials, see chapter II.2.2 Burial places on p. 53.