Los profesionales de las necrópolis en el Egipto ptolemaico

Resum

The purpose of this dissertation is the study of the communities of funerary workers as attested in the papyrological documentary sources from Ptolemaic Egypt. The term «funerary workers» specifically refers to those individuals who participated in the preparation of dead bodies, their burial as well as the ritual care after burial. This study has brought together the documentary sources that these individuals once kept in their private archives in order to cast some light on the structure and social dynamics of the necropolis personnel, the impact on these communities of the establishment of a Greek monarchy, as well as their response to some of the transformations that might have taken place in both the socioeconomic and legal spheres. The funerary workers have not yet been the object of/subjected to a systematic study, but have been typically approached by modern scholars with a local and often partial focus. In order to fill this gap in modern scholarship, I have put together twenty-four private archives, personal and familiar, monolingual or bilingual, that once belonged to the funerary workers who worked in the necropoleis in Thebes, the Kynopolite nome, Hawara, Tanis and the Memphite nome. Through the analysis of the documentary sources they kept in their archives this essay tries to answer two interrelated questions: first, the nature of the relations between the members of the necropolis personnel, and second, the extension, quality and nature of the relations between the funerary workers with the society at large...