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some sort of raw materials for the craftsmen.” The fact of commanding such a high
ranking official as the ‘viceroy of Nubia’ to be of assistance to a ‘royal wdpw’ to accomplish
his tasks on behalf of the ruler himself also demonstrates the esteemed and important
position of these officials as personal representatives of the king.
11.5.3. Overview of the titles held by the officials
The titles held by the high officials — generally as well as regarding their representatives
in the present corpus — can mainly be categorized into three categories: ranking titles,
functional titles and honorific titles. The determination of officials according to various
titles was obviously a central element of the functioning of the administration and the
royal court.” In several cases, however, it is immensely difficult to determine which
category a particular title belongs to, and in some instances, the line between the catego¬
ries is blurred. The ranking titles showed the high ranking situation of an individual
within the royal court as well as in society, without any actual official function of their
bearer.?”° Five of them are known: jrj-p“t ‘member of the elite’, 43tj-° ‘foremost of action’,
htmtj-bjtj royal sealer’, smr-w“.tj ‘sole friend’, rh nswt ‘acquaintance of the king’, among
which the first two usually appear together. By contrast, functional titles did have an
actual scope of official duties, however, it must be noted that they were also possibly
granted as a favour by the ruler to the officials at the end of their careers as a provision
for their maintenance during their old age. Functional titles were given as permanent
offices and also as temporary assignments for particular projects or missions. There are
functional titles the function of which are more or less clear, but in some cases — just
like by the subject of the present study — the duties behind the title are hard to define,
or not even interpretable at all. Besides, it is very difficult — in several cases even impos¬
sible — to determine the difference between the permanent and the temporary titles of
an official on his monuments, especially on his funerary ones where he wished to rep¬
resent all of his titles that he gained and bore during his whole life. The third category
of the titles are the honorific titles, the use of which depended entirely on the favour of
the ruler and they are important elements of the self-representation of an official express¬
4 For a discussion on Ines, see p. 249, for the text of the letter, see [95.4] Pap. Turin 1896 on p. 604.
75 For the structure of the ancient Egyptian administration in different periods, see Helck 1954; Helck
1958; Baer 1960; Strudwick 1985; Grajetzki 2000.
7° For further discussion on the ranking titles, see Baer, 1974, 2-8; Grajetzki, 2000, 220-226; Grajetzki,
2009, 5-6.