The First Intermediate Period (c. 2184–2040 BC) in Egypt is characterised by both ancient Egyptian cultural memory and earlier Egyptology as a period of political as well as social upheaval and disruption. Recent studies have shown that the changes that occurred at the time should be understood as a profound social transition which, however, the Egyptians of the First Intermediate Period did not experience as a cataclysm. Political decentralization allowed provincial/local leaders and powerful families to increase their wealth and expand their authority over a wider region, while a new intermediary social category (often called “excellent commoners” in contemporaneous texts) rose to wealth and status. Both the elite and the new men recorded their lives in biographical inscriptions written in their tombs and on stelae. By studying the themes and motives of these biographies, as well as their changes over time, the paper explores how the two social groups defined their identities in the new political and social climate. Social and regional variations are also investigated, as well as the relationships between biographical self-representation, social norm and social organisation.

According to prevailing central values of the Middle Kingdom, human work emerged in two basic forms that corresponded to two sorts of active relationship to the world; these were creating something new and transforming something existent. The dualistic view of work was manifest in a twofold terminology referring to activities performed by privileged groups on the one hand, and an inferior form of work on the other. Moreover, having been rooted in the ideology of kingship, it implicated a twofold conception of dependency relations between actors of the shared society of gods, the dead and humans, dividing the basic social units of the Egyptians, state and family respectively, into two qualitatively different groups. Privileged work was esteemed and rewarded, thus connecting superiors and subordinates by patronage and reciprocity, while the other type of work involved individuals submissive to their lords. This view of work coincides with a dualistic classification of society, so characteristic of the Middle Kingdom. However, a range of tools to evade work both on earth and in the afterlife hints at a rather intricate system, showing a variety of relationships between beneficiaries of work and its performers.