Book Review: Divine Households. Administrative and Economic Aspects of the New Kingdom Royal Memorial Temples in Western Thebes

Abstract

sees this as a change brought about through the extended contact between Egypt and the states of the Near East that pressured Egypt eventually to conform to Near Eastern diplomatic custom. However, since the princess concerned is the daughter of Ramesses and his first Hittite wife, it is possible that she was in a different category from the daughters of his Egyptian wives, and there is no evidence in the Hittite correspondence that any other daughters of Ramesses II were in the market for an international marriage. All in all, it is clear that Egyptian queens (mwt nsw and hmt nsw wrt) had a very limited role in the system of international diplomatic correspondence. Although a larger part is played by the daughters of foreign rulers, it is never as correspondents, but only as the means to cement alliances or show the loyalty of a subject ruler to his overlord. Roth sets her material into a theoretical framework drawn from sociology. Using the premise that cross-cultural contact brings about change, she wants to know what the consequences of Egypt's contacts with Near Eastern states were for the ideology of kingship and the queen's role in it and for the actual political role of royal women in Egyptian foreign policy. A broad but rather banal answer seems to be that such contact led on the one hand to the acceptance and adaptation of foreign models and on the other, to the strengthening of the traditional view towards foreigners. The former is shown in the external sources and the latter in the internal ones, so that to see the whole picture, one must use both types of sources together. In order to describe the processes of cultural change that result from the interaction of individuals and groups from different cultures, Roth borrows from sociology the idea of network models. Thus, at an ideological level, where Egypt shows asymmetric relationships with other states, we have an egocentric network. Egyptian queens, as hmot (nt ) tszo nbw and subjugators of enemies, and daughters of foreign rulers coming to Egypt to marry the king in a one way direction only, are part of this egocentric, asymmetrical network. At a diplomatic level, however, Egypt has symmetrical relationships with other states, both sending and receiving ambassadors and correspondence. As far as Egyptian queens participated in this latter system-and their participation was limited-they too were part of an equal network with symmetrical relationships between its various parts. Roth then argues that in the area of international marriage politics, Egypt changes from an egocentric, asymmetrical model to an equal, symmetrical network when Ramesses II agrees to marry his daughter by his first Hittite wife to a foreign ruler. Finally, Roth posits that individuals form bridges between networks over which information can be disseminated. In this way, daughters of foreign rulers entering Egypt with their entourages formed a link between Egypt and the culture they had come from and thus brought about cultural exchange both through concrete objects, such as those in their dowry and bride price, and through the flow of abstract ideas back and forth. However, she does not identify actual changes within Egyptian culture that might have been brought about in this way. For instance, was this how some of the foreign deities that became popular during the reign of Amenhotep III were introduced into Egypt? The results derived from the application of this particular methodological framework seem in the end to be rather slight and add little to our interpretation of the role of royal women in Egyptian foreign policy. Indeed, when all is said and done, this role-whether ideological for home consumption or actual as part of the international diplomatic system-turns out to have been remarkably small. The women who played the largest part were the many daughters of foreign rulers who acted as the cement that held together the network of alliances between equal rulers on the one hand and the overlord-vassal relationships between Egypt and subject rulers on the other. Almost totally anonymous in the record, they were not, however, major, independent players or instigators of action, but merely pawns to be moved around to suit the purposes of their fathers.