Speaking as an Ancient Egyptian

I here consider the speech captions (or ‘Reden und Rufe’) found in the so-called daily life scenes of Saite tombs in order to show to which extent they succeeded in imitating the phraseology and the état-de-langue of the mastabas from the Old Kingdom. Four funerary monuments only are concerned by this literary genre, namely the tombs of Ankhefensekhmet (Saqqara), Ibi (Thebes), Montuemhat (Thebes), and an unknown owner (unknown provenance). I will first discuss the themes in which such speeches were included and enlarge the scope by considering how these themes were previously treated from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom. I will then show how the Saite ‘Reden und Rufe’ reused previous speech captions and that these tomb owners shared some interests that linked them to a common cultural network. This small but coherent corpus allows me to address issues of textual transmission during the Saite Period when the Ancient Egyptians wished to copy their ancestors.