"Like a son to me”: the household metaphor as marker of hierarchical relationships between Egyptians and foreigners in Egyptian tales

This paper addresses the question of hierarchical relationships between Egyptians and foreigners in fictional texts. The strategy that is explored is the recurrent reference to the household metaphor, which is also widely used in diplomatic correspondence throughout the Near East during the Bronze Age. Attestations of this metaphor are also found in the relations between Egypt and the Levant, notoriously in the Amarna letters. Interestingly, a closer look at travel narratives and other tales including a travel component suggest that references to the household metaphor became also a literary theme classifying situations and behaviors as “foreign”, and more specifically “Levantine”. They can indeed be contrasted with other implicit references to international relationships involving other regions and primary interactions of different nature, for example, Levant vs Nubia or Punt and diplomacy vs trade. Furthermore, I argue here that the evolution of the household metaphor realizations in fictional texts reflects the evolution of its actual use in diplomatic context and therefore provides further evidence of the dynamics of international hierarchical relationships between Egypt and the Levant at given times. More specifically, it records for instance a paradigmatic shift between the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Finally, other elements are also pointed out to complete the picture and add to hierarchical status definition, such as the strategies for the expression of irony and the motion dynamics between protagonists that implicitly reveal hierarchical differences.