Exploring Third-Party (Im)politeness in the Late Ramesside Letters

Traditional (im)politeness research approaches, and indeed traditional approaches within wider pragmatic theories, work very much on the idea that communication takes place between a sender and a receiver. This typically means that it is dyadic, i.e., between two individuals, with the analysis of the communicative act limited to the direct interaction between two interlocutors. However, research by Hatfield and Hahn (2014), Xia and Lan (2019), van Gils and Risselada (2022) highlights that communicative events are far more complex that the dyadic approach suggests, and that triadic or third-party involvement in communication needs further investigation. This chapter will look to conceptualise third-party (im)politeness in ancient Egypt via a case study analysis of the New Kingdom Late Ramesside Letters, a corpus of over 70 letters dating to the reign of Ramesses XI (ca. 1099–1069 BCE). Particularly, this chapter will present a framework for exploring “identified” third-party (im)politeness, those individuals named in the letter, and “unidentified” third-party (im)politeness, those not named but who would have been part of the communicative event that took place outside of the letter itself.