Chapter 2 notes the available sources for exploring kinship and marriage in ancient Egypt in the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom. Decoding modes of display is necessary to discover what monumental sources can reveal about relationships.

In order to assess a possible change in monumental display of social groups from the First Intermediate Period to the Middle Kingdom, the sites of Naga ed-Deir and Abydos are taken as case studies for each of those periods respectively. These sites show that stelae were often grouped into clusters in either tombs or memorial chapels, both sharing a commemorative purpose.

Chapter 2 illustrates the importance of a group approach for stelae in order to extract relevant information about emic constructions of the social fabric. In particular, an alleged clear-cut differentiation between funerary and commemorative stelae is questioned, as these monuments were always mediated through memorial practices. In addition, the articulation of iconographic and inscriptional evidence is shown to provide a more complete assessment of stelae; for example, formulaic phrases often add references to collateral relatives who are not represented iconographically on stelae.

Chapter 5 discusses methodologies for the analysis of social groups in ancient Egypt, addressing their benefits as well as their limitations. Anthropological study of kinship has usually been undertaken in living societies, but can also be tackled for cultures no longer existing Some methodologies used for social analysis in the past include the Lévi-Straussian notion of house societies, Social Network Analysis, prosopography, or sociography. The choice of method is reliant on the type of evidence that is available; in particular, the limited number of sources in ancient Egypt favours qualitative over quantitative analysis.

For that reason, I propose a model called koinography that combines suggestions from several of these approaches. It is based on the idea that social groups, and not individuals, should be treated as the preferred unit of social analysis, and that the factor of time is a fundamental tool to explore the position and role of that group in wider society. In particular, the model of the developmental cycle of the group originally proposed by Meyer Fortes has served as inspiration for the incorporation of a more dynamic and diachronic dimension into the study of ancient Egyptian groups.