«Girls Just Want to Have Fun»: costruzione iconografica ed elaborazione formale del ruolo della fanciulla in antico Egitto

It is not easy to find textual and iconographic elements in ancient Egyptian documentation that refer to the role of girls in a socio-cultural landscape that, with a few exceptions, was largely dominated by a male perspective and sometimes even limited to a certain socio-economic status. The question of whether or not girls have benefited from fun e fun-damental rights therefore raises several problems of interpretation and approach. Given this premise, two questions must be asked, with the aim of analysing, as neutrally as possible, the ways in which the role of the maiden was formally constructed and elaborated in ancient Egypt: 1. What are the lexemes used to indicate what we translate as ‘maiden’, ‘child’, ‘girl’ in Egyptian language and writing? How do we iconographically distinguish this childish, feminine category?