The Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period Royal Decrees Revisited: Evidence of Historical and Sociopolitical Change
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period royal decrees were documents commissioned by the king and placed at the gates of temples with important messages concerning the regulation of work, cultic, and economic activities. In this article I review the validity of these texts as sources of historical research for modern scholars and their effective use as documents by the ancient Egyptians. I propose that royal decrees offer valuable information concerning the king’s access and impact on temple economies at the end of the Old Kingdom and beginning of the First Intermediate Period. This access remained continuous and unchanged until the second half of the reign of Pepi II when non-royal patronage becomes more prominent in the texts and the presence of royal sealings decreases. I challenge the impression that royal decrees had no practical validity for the ancient Egyptians by showing that the permissions and restrictions exposed in the decrees are consistent with shifts in rhetoric and external evidence for historical change at the end of the Old Kingdom.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it