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Amunnakht, scribe in the necropolis of Deir el-Medina, is a well-known figure in Ancient Egyptian history. He was active in the reigns of Ramses III to Ramses VI. From his quill we have not only administrative records but also a series of literary and didactic texts. In addition to the six literary pieces, mostly fragments, ascribed to him previously, a new one, the fragment of a hymn or eulogy to one of these kings, is preserved in Ostracon O Berlin P 14262. After a hieroglyphic transliteration, phonetic transcription, translation, and detailed commentary, the question of whether Amunnakht was the author or simply the copyist of this and some — or all — of the other texts in question is discussed.

This chapter examines maps in ancient Egypt which depicted not only topography but also the cosmos. It looks at the mapmaking activities of artisans and scribes in addition to their production of relatively detailed plans of either the projected or completed tombs of specific pharaohs. It focuses on one site, Deir el Medina, a village built to house the workers of the royal tombs and their families. It also discusses the maplike aspects of temple art during the period, a world map depicting the victories of Seti I, a map partially preserved in the form of fifteen fragments of papyrus in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, and a maplike product known as the “Book of the Fayum”.

The isolated village of Deir el Medina, home to the men who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, is the best documented single community from pharaonic Egypt. Documents record work management, the provision and payment of wages, relations with the central state hierarchy, and the personal, legal, and commercial business of individual inhabitants. This chapter evaluates the use of texts for management by the local scribes, and the writing and holding of personal documents by members of the community. It emphasizes the role of writing as a process reinforcing the authority of resident scribes as local headmen, in both administrative function and social leadership, as well as the ephemeral nature of working documents and the very limited value of private documents as autonomous witness. No reference to effective local archive is found, and the nature of written report submitted to the central hierarchy was very general.

The Ramesside period saw the contraction of Egypt’s hegemony in the ancient Mediterranean, extraordinary economic contraction and lessening monumental production, and generations of mass migrations, destabilizing Egypt. The period followed Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, an apex of steady growth, consistent wealth, and high-quality artistic production under able and well-known kings to whom the Ramesside period kings are often compared to their detriment. Should one view the Ramesside period in a different way? Ramesside kings witnessed a steady decline of authority, experiencing palace infighting so intense that it resulted in two civil wars. This period was also punctuated by one of the most devastating social and global apocalypses the Mediterranean and ancient Near East had ever known—the Bronze Age collapse. The fall of the Twentieth Dynasty was part of a larger crisis in economic, political, and climatic systems, not a miscalculation of one or two dynastic families. When the Ramesside kings did finally fall from power, historians draw a stark line between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, on the one hand, and the Twenty-first Dynasty, on the other, even though decentralized and competitive ruling strategies remained largely unchanged from one period to the next. The historical creation of a crisp division between the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period can be understood as the chief reason why Egyptologists do not see the Ramesside period for what it was, a runway that formed the elements of the ensuing Iron Age.

This chapter investigates linguistic variation in the texts written by the Deir el-Medina scribe Amennakhte son of Ipuy in New Kingdom Egypt (Twentieth Dynasty; c. 1150 BCE). After a discussion of the challenge posed by the identification of scribes and authors in this sociocultural setting, I provide an overview of the corpus of texts that can tentatively be linked to this individual and justify the selection that has been made for the present study. The core of this paper is then devoted to a multidimensional analysis of Amennakhte’s linguistic registers. By combining the results of this section with a description of Amennakhte’s scribal habits—both at the graphemo-morphological and constructional levels—I test the possibility of using ‘idiolectal’ features to identify the scribe (or the author) of other texts stemming from the community of Deir el-Medina and closely related to Amennakhte.