Kanawati Naguib. Governmental Reforms in Old Kingdom Egypt

Aris & Phillips, 1980. — 176 p. — ISBN-10 0856681687; ISBN-13 978-0856681684.In recent years our understanding of the Egyptian administration has been considerably broadened by a number of studies on this topic. Yet these studies have revealed one of the main obstacles to a full comprehension of this subject - i.e. the exact dating of the Old Kingdom officials, whose titles are our main source for reconstructing the administrative system(s) of the period. By juxtaposing officials whom I shall show are not contemporaneous it has been determined that separate developments took place in individual provinces, a situation which could only arise if the central government had become considerably weaker. But we have no evidence of this! Also by dating many officials with the same high title (e.g. vizier or overseer of Upper Egypt) to a specific period, some scholars have been forced to conclude that such purely administrative titles were in most cases honorific.