The hypothesis of the social “class” of nedjesu (nDsw)– “free citizens” who allegedly owned plots of land and were therefore economically independent from the state — has been figuring in the descriptions of the social system of Middle Kingdom Egypt already for more than a century. It recurs in current Egyptology even despite the fact that it was not supported in the “Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache II” (1928), and was exhaustively refuted by O. D. Berlev (1978) and D. Franke (1998). The present article traces the history of this hypothesis and discusses factors of its unjustified longevity. The root cause of the latter is the grave deficiency of our sources and knowledge about the social system of the Middle Kingdom which makes it impossible to compose its generalized conceptual descriptions based only on well-established facts and well-proven assertions. Therefore, the scholars who must or want to create such descriptions have to recourse to “parallels” of other epochs and countries, to “sophisticated methods and theories borrowed from social sciences” (J. C. Moreno Garcia) — in other words, to assumptions and speculations. For a number of these descriptions, the theory of the “class” of nedjesu is indispensable, while their authors, accustomed to such research attitudes, consider it permissible to use a hypothesis or concept without scrupulously checking it against all available sources. Hence one can expect that, even despite all the refutations, the hypothesis in question will still recur for a long time in egyptological publications in merry-go-round manner (Refs. 34)