Kings from Below: How Egyptians Navigated Royal Power in the Middle Kingdom

Luiza Osorio G. Silva
Art History
UC Irvine

Today, ancient Egypt is synonymous with kings. Yet the ways in which royal power fit into society have not been systematically examined, resulting in untested assumptions about the centrality of kingship. Kings from Below challenges scholarly and popular narratives of the prominence of Egyptian kingship based on royal sources. Rather than assuming that kings prevailed over society, the book proposes that ordinary Egyptians had rich lives that intersected with, but were not simply subject to, royal power. In using textual, archaeological, and iconographic evidence from the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055–1650 BCE), I explore varied engagements with kingship through monuments, rituals, symbols, and labor. I showcase the complex ways in which ordinary Egyptians experienced the seemingly sharp division between kings and their subjects, thus revealing the limits of royal power. Examples of these engagements range from the desecration of a pyramid to the invocation of kings in private correspondence by some, but not all, Egyptians. The complexity of relationships between royal and ordinary members of society uncovered in the book is a springboard for thinking about power dynamics, the interface between ideology and practice, and human possibility: not only in civilizations ruled by kings, and not only in the past.