RCCHU Ancient History International Seminars: II. Ethics and Rhetoric of Service: Persuasion in Old Kingdom Egypt (2700-2200 BCE)

This talk explores how linguistic methodologies can help us understand ancient minds and cultures. A comparison of ancient Egyptian manners and political rhetoric shows that cultural values were adopted, exploited, and promoted in discourses of power to persuade peers and subjects into compliance. Egypt’s Old Kingdom (ca. 2700-2200 BCE), popularly known as “the Pyramid Age”, is the oldest regime in the world to showcase a centralized government, a homogeneous language and script, and an ideology encompassing over 1,400 km in and around the Nile Valley. An examination of the textual evidence suggests that the Egyptian kings’ political discourse was based on an ambiguation of cooperation and consent. The model succeeded for several centuries because reciprocal care was a prominent community value visible in interpersonal communication. The combination of private and royal sources under the lenses of politeness research and discourse analysis explains the role that ethics played in the Egyptians’ acceptance of authoritarianism, questioning a top-down approach to power imposition.

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Organized by: Unai Iriarte Asarta (RCCHU Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University)

Speaker: Victoria Almansa-Villatoro (Harvard University)

Sponsor: RCCHU; Havard University