Oldal 87 [87]
OCR
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 categories 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 impossible — 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 represent 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 express4 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.
