Visualizing an Ancient Egyptian Queen The Tomb of the 1st Dynasty Queen Meret-Neith at Abydos

Representations and Reality of Poverty in Ancient Egypt. The poor, their identities and their practices.

Poverty in ancient Egypt is a subject that remains largely unexplored. While in ancient Egyptian language, there is a whole series of terms used to describe poverty and to designate the poor, the proposed translations remain imprecise. The texts sometimes give an insight into what it means to be poor but these writings are often subjective because texts are usually written by the elites for the elites. Images are subject to the same rule, with Egyptian art obeying strict conventions and showing an ideal image of the order of the world. As a result, the poor have so far occupied only a limited place in Egyptological studies which have instead based a large part of its theories on the elites, particularly given the abundance and quality of vestiges they left behind. Yet, the elites, which held economic, politico-religious and cultural power, or had close ties to it, would have represented only a small percentage of the population. How can one then write a social and economic history of ancient Egypt if one does not take into consideration those people who did not belong to the elites? Those ordinary people (peasants, manual workers etc.), who constituted a large part of the population, likely lived in relative poverty and simplicity. However, we do not really know who the poor were, how and where did they lived or what their daily practices were.