Letter-writing in Western Thebes: From collective to individual practices

The aim of this paper is to explore the dialectic between what constitute, on the one hand, collective documentary and editorial practices and, on the other hand, personal habits (idiotisms) by taking as a case study the published and unpublished letters found in Western Thebes and dated from the Ramesside period. In concrete terms, it will be an attempt to determine the extent to which the individual can be apprehended through his or her correspondence. The examination of sources will focus on the materiality of the texts (layout, writing and use of support and ink) and, to a lesser extent, on their content (language and style). This approach, which involves drawing a line between what is collective and what is individual, can be ambitious. Indeed, the corpus explored usually only offers fragmented information, either because the material is poorly preserved, because no quality image is available for certain documents, or because the content of the message, in the absence of context, is difficult to capture. The survey will be based on data from studies on the organization of the text (Assmann 1987; Vernus 1985 & 1989, etc.), on data on epistolary genre (Bakir 1970; Sweeney 2001; Haring 2009; etc.) and on works on the identification of handwritings as well (a list of these studies is available on the Deir el-Medina Database. See recently Polis 2017 concerning Amennakhte son of Ipouy, with an overview of the issue, and Polis 2014 for some additional bibliographical guidelines).