By the thirtieth year of the reign of Nebhepetra Mentuhotep II, Egypt was once again a united country under the rule of one king. As a king who united the Egyptian state, Mentuhotep II was remembered later on a par with Menes of the First Dynasty and Ahmose of the Eighteenth (Habachi 1963, 50; Kemp 2006, 63). Mentuhotep II descended from a line of nomarchs, beginning with Intef the Great, who ruled Thebes during the First Intermediate Period. These local rulers used Horus names, beginning with Intef I, the third ruler in this dynastic line, and by the reign of Mentuhotep II’s grandfather, Wa’ankh Intef II, the fourth ruler, these men are calling themselves: “King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Son of Ra.”

This book traces how a discourse of honor and shame helped create the imperial state in China. Through examining changing claims to honor, it studies Warring States articulations of new social roles and networks, early imperial redefinitions of the state’s power and its agents’ status, and how groups not employed by the state asserted a status that matched or exceeded that attributed to the bureaucracy. Such groups also denounced as shameful the elite pursuits of wealth or high office that motivated those who constituted the formal state and political elites. These groups included scholars, hermits, bravoes, writers, and locally powerful families, and, while not formally part of the state-defined public realm, in practice they became essential to the functioning of the imperial order. The roles that they played, and the language in which these were justified, came to define a non-state public realm which remained in permanent tension with the imperial government. Thus the evolving language of honor and shame allows us to move beyond a focus on the court and bureaucracy to achieve a more complete picture of Han imperial state and society.

The Warring States polity that emerged through the destruction of the old nobility and their segmentary polity was centered around an increasingly powerful autocrat, and based on peasants who paid taxes and provided military service. These two poles were linked by bureaucrats who registered the population and extracted taxes and services, and courtiers or counselors who assisted the ruler. States grew by swallowing up others, until only seven or eight remained, in which most peasants served in the armies. In Qin state, and probably others, this culminated in a state order that ranked the entirety of the free peasant population on the basis of service. Received texts and archaeologically-recovered documents show that the ranking of the population in this hierarchy of titles became fundamental to the legal and administrative orders that defined the place of the individual. Thus new ideas of honor and shame, elaborated in legal codes and administrative practices, were fundamental to the new states.

Pharaonic Egypt is often viewed as having been monolithic and unchanging. Ancient Egyptian civilization was certainly long-lasting, and throughout its 3,000 years the basic tenets of its culture endured. There was development and change, however, as kings faced evolving situations, both natural and manmade, and responded to political and economic pressures in order to keep their hold on power. From the time of the very first dynasty, however, the ideology of royal power in Egypt “contained certain key concepts that all successive pharaohs strove to maintain intact” (Valbelle 2002, 97).

The next two chapters examine changes in the honor-shame discourse in the Warring States period (ca. 500 – 220 BCE), when larger, territorial states replaced the warrior aristocracy with bureaucratic administrators and peasant soldiers. Re-structuring Warring States society entailed forming new groups through elective ties of comradeship or discipleship and of devotion to political superiors. The honor/shame complex defined all these ties. This chapter traces the development of ideas about honor outside of ascribed status and the formal state order. These ideas were articulated by the earliest Chinese critical thinkers, who formed around the figure of Confucius. Defining themselves against conventional values, they claimed honor derived from devotion to study and virtues. They also argued that what others regarded as shameful, low status or poverty, could demonstrate a higher honor that refused to curry favor or pursue wealth. Although they sought rulers’ patronage, and offered them advice, they rejected serving those who refused the virtues they espoused, thus proving their true honor. Several rulers granted such men titles and stipends that did not entail government service. Finally, claims to honor in this period marked the emergence of networks of patrons and clients, as well as those formed by bravoes.

The second chapter focuses on women's legal status and ethnicity grouping together the partly overlapping categories of female slaves, freedwomen and women of foreign (non-Roman) background on the basis of their funerary inscriptions. The first part starts with female slaves followed by the more abundant evidence for freedwomen and discusses their employment within large households, their relationship with their (former) masters, including marriages between owners and their (former) slaves, their relationships with their fellow slaves and freedpeople, and their achievements. It ends with issues of manumission and the benefits of Roman citizenship (such as the ius liberorum freeing female citizens with three of more children from guardianship). The second part on citizenship and ethnicity focuses on women in the regions along the northern and western frontiers of the Roman Empire,where we find non-Roman citizens adopting Roman burial customs but at the same time underlining their ethnic identity by their local dress or the record of their ethnic origin in the inscription.The chapter also includes local citizenhip and ends with the various relationships between local women and the Roman army.

The first chapter deals with women's various roles within their families and households and covers women of all classes indiscriminately (except for the imperial family). It starts with their central positions as wives, throwing light on the traditional wifely virtues and Roman marital ideals but also on marital problems, including divorce and even murder. The first part is followed by separate parts on women's roles as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, siblings and other relations such as aunts and nieces, and on women's roles in foster families and step families, thus presenting a lively overview of women's various familial roles in the course of their lives and the expectations that went with these different roles. The inscriptions and graffiti record feelings of joy at childbirth, love and praise for a happy marriage, attachment between mothers and children and mourning and anger at bereavement. Many epitaphs express the wish to have died first or the hope to be reunited in death.

This chapter deals with women’s roles in the religious life of their cities, both as cult officials and as devotees. Apart from the Vestals, Roman cities had priestesses of a few, mostly female, deities, such as Ceres, Venus, Tellus and Juno, but also Isis, Cybele and Bona Dea. Priestesses of the imperial cult are amply attested accross the Roman West (but not in Rome) serving both the living and the deified empresses. They were mostly fromwealthy families of the local elite. Apart from priesthoods, a wide range of lesser religious functions were open to women of lower rank, most of them paid. For the performance of religious ceremonies, we find female musicians, dancers, basket-bearers and sacrificial attendants, as well as magistrae and ministrae, female temple-wardens and keepers of sacrificial animals. The last part of the chapter offers a sample of their dedications to male and female deities, both Roman and local, thus giving an impression of their religious allegiancies and their participation in rituals.