Deborah Sweeney

Tel Aviv University

The freedom to ask for what one wants and the ability to obtain it are significant indicators of one’s social power. In this paper, I will look at requests as they are represented in various textual genres from the Ramesside period. How did women and men phrase their requests in different settings, and how did they try and convince their addressees to comply with them? In some cultures, women are thought to speak more politely than men; I will investigate whether this is true of representations of women making requests in this corpus, and whether women seem to have had as much success as men in getting their requests answered. However, gender never exists alone in social interaction. I will also attempt to trace the interaction of gender with other actors which might affect requests, such as the relative status of the speakers, the amount of intimacy between them and the relative difficulty of the request.

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