Аннотация:The article is intended to forward a balanced approach towards the understanding of the basic social terms pat, rxyt, and Hnmmt/Hmmt, which, as it is generally accepted, come back to the most ancient epoch of the Egyptian history. The consideration of the relevant fragments of the Pyramid Texts, together with the representations of pat and rxyt in the scenery of the Opet feast at Thebes, allow to suggest that basically these two terms were applied to the groups of people authorized and unauthorized, respectively, to participate in ritual. The parallel with the patricians and the plebeians of the archaic Rome, in Niebuhr’s interpretation of these notions, is called for; the ‘patricians’- pat could presumably be the members of the polity that united Egypt under the rule of the Horus’ kings of Dynasty “0”, while the ‘plebeians’- rxyt must have been in this case the members of the polities conquered by Dynasty “0” and initially alien to its cults, in the first place to the dynastic cult of Horus. The third group, Hnmmt, must have initially comprised the servants of the state (in the first place, the warriors) directly connected to the king; their social identity must have been defined after this connection rather than after their initial origin from pat or rxyt. These divisions of the Egyptians must have lived quite shortly; by the Old Kingdom they must have been replaced in the social reality by the uniformity of the Egyptians under the royal power and developed into rather religious terms.
The article is followed by the addendum “rxyt and the ‘Doors of Sky’ in the Pyramid Texts and in the Planning of Royal Tombs” (by Xenia F. Karlova), in which the interpretation of rxyt as an “obstacle” on the king’s posthumous celestial route is delineated.