(Im-)Politeness Strategies and Formulas in the “Reden und Rufe”

This paper sets out to investigate speech captions in private tombs—the so-called Reden und Rufe as described first by Adolf Erman in 1918. Choices of Positive, Mock, and Negative (Im-)Politeness will be revealed in the captions’ linguistic patterns. Far from being true samples of the vernacular language in ancient Egypt, they are short texts written as if spoken with a deliberate choice of linguistic features. The scribes (or artists) who worked on the tombs’ decorations consciously chose specific idioms and formulas drawn from a socially imposed set of rules to make these daily-life scenes appear more life-like and real with somehow sound recorded through the captions. This paper will explore which strategies are used to either redress the wants of the addressee’s positive/negative face or to damage the wants of the addressee’s positive/negative face. It will first address interactions between superiors and subordinates (high-to-low and low-to-high). Subsequently, attention will be given to interactions between equals. It is argued that speech captions in private tombs are extremely fruitful research avenues for sociolinguistics and more specifically for (historical) politeness research.