Solidarity Politeness in Old Kingdom Speech Captions

What is it about?

The present paper explores the politeness strategies at work between socially equal individuals of low-ranking status in the so-called daily-life scenes of the Old Kingdom tombs (2675–2250 BC). These face-to-face interchange depictions are part of a highly standardised and idealised compositional frame that reflects the ancient Egyptian elite’s view of society. Many of them are accompanied by short texts intended to replicate the dialogues between the interlocutors—they are as-if-spoken speech captions. Exemplifying Brown and Levinson's concept of positive politeness, the sources display various linguistic means by which they build and reinforce a framework of solidarity, thus illustrating Scollon and Scollon’s concept of “solidarity politeness” (Scollon & Scollon, 1995). The article opens with preliminary remarks on the socio-pragmatic context and decorum (§1-2) and presents the corpus (§3). It then exposes the methodology and frameworks (§4) before focusing on politeness strategies in requests and responses (§5). The paper follows a data-driven approach to explore the horizontal politeness strategies in use in the Old Kingdom speech captions (§§5.1–5.2). A discussion follows on volition and discernment, building on previous politeness theories, to better understand which aspect is developed in the Old Kingdom depictions of such face-to-face interchanges (§5.3). It is argued that these multimodal sources, even if framed within the ruling group ideology, are extremely fruitful research avenues for sociolinguistics and historical politeness research (§6).

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Why is it important?

This paper is part of the first book-length study of (Im-)Politeness research on ancient Egyptian texts covering all stages of the language as well as hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and Coptic scripts, with a focus on a unique corpus (captions in daily life scenes in elite tombs).