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(abstract t.b.a.)
Egyptologists have long become aware of the elite bias in their record and its interpretation. Alternative evidence of settlements, local shrines, and low-status cemeteries has accumulated over the past forty years, and new readings of documentary texts have unveiled a high degree of social diversity in pharaonic Egypt masked by the unifying concepts of monumental display. However, what Jan Assmann termed “the monumental discourse” of Egypt remains the preferred context for advanced synthesis and shapes the perception of Egypt outside Egyptology. The “non-elite” have been tagged on to the picture yet without much consideration of the impact this could have on developing social and cultural theory. This paper explores how the elite bias of Egyptology is tied up with the colonial origins of the subject and how engagement with the non-elite might contribute to increasing theoretical self-reflection. I argue that consideration of the non-elite goes beyond adding a marginalized group to the better studied ideas and practices of the elite and rather is an inquiry into social cohesion and the implicit dimensions of ancient Egyptian society and culture.
Serabit el-Khadim with its temple of the goddess Hathor is an ancient Egyptian site, located in southwest Sinai where mining expeditions used to extract copper and turquoise. 223 Middle Kingdom, 188 New Kingdom, and 95 undated inscriptions are attested from this site. They are written in hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, and hybrid scipt – i.e., script between hieroglyphic and hieratic and proto-Sinaitic, which is considered the earliest alphabetic writing in the world. The reason for using these different scripts is still unclear. A paleographical study for these inscriptions, which has never been conducted, can help to explore the evolution of sub-elite writing community in ancient Egypt over time and space. Aiming to tackle the socialization of a crucial contact area at the near border landscape between Egypt and the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC, through tracking the identities and the cross-cultural perspective of the sub-elite community in Sinai as general and Serabit el-Khadim specifically.
This paper will examine (a) the writing practices of the scribes and their social contexts, (b) the scribes’ place of origin who carved the inscriptions in Serabit el-Khadim and (c) how did they define themselves?
Si l’on trouve quelques attestations de femme et d’hommes sans titre ni fonction sur des stèles dans les grandes nécropoles à Saqqâra, Hélouan, Abydos ou Abou Rawash, de rares exceptions nous indiquent pourtant des occupations professionnelles telles que boucher, gardien, bouvier, coiffeur, sculpteur, charpentier, servante, jardinier, jetant ainsi une faible lueur sur les « petites gens » en ces temps reculés. Qui étaient-ils ? Comment étaient-ils insérés dans la société d’alors ? A-t-on retrouvé des traces de leurs activités dans le contexte urbain ? Des questions d’autant plus intéressantes qu’elles vont amener, entre autres, à mettre le focus sur ce que P. Kaplony avait qualifié de Kollektivsiegel – cette succession de groupes lexicaux gravés sur un même sceau-cylindre – dans laquelle il reconnaissait un type de scellé uniquement attesté du milieu – 2e moitié de la IIe dynastie à la fin de la IIIe dynastie à plusieurs noms de personnes en charge de la même fonction.
Qu’ils n’aient eu de collectif que le nom, l’analyse des composantes (nom, titre(s), épithètes) de ce type de sceau découvert tant dans les centres urbains contemporains de Bouto, Naqada, Hierakonpolis, Elkab, Éléphantine et plus récemment à Kom Ombo (2022) que dans le contexte funéraire royal à Abydos et à Saqqâra le mit en exergue pour la toute première fois dans l’étude du corpus sigillographique d’Éléphantine. Ce qui permit de mettre en lumière différentes catégories de personnels civils et administratifs, notamment deux groupes sociaux – les « Mjtr » et les fonctionnaires locaux « Rnw », femmes incluses – qui furent fondamentaux dans le programme royal de colonisation urbaine et de mise en valeur du territoire de la Vallée du Nil à partir du milieu de la IIe dynastie (Horus Ninetjer).
The poverty is considered the biggest problem that the common people faced in ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians expressed through the arts of sculpture, engraving, and literary sources the life of the impoverished class, deprived of the pleasures of life. The teachings of Dua-Khety, and the Instruction of Ptahhotep, serve as a fundamental source for identifying and categorizing the destitute class into seventeen professions, all of which are considered to be toil, degradation, and poverty. The most significant of these professions include blacksmithing, pottery making, brickmaking, construction work, carpentry, farming, weaving, bird-catching, postal carrier, and fishing. The farmer is considered the poorest among these professions due to the hardships and wearing worn-out clothes, experiencing poverty, suffering from severe diseases, and struggling to provide for his family. He lives like a weak animal among lions. The teachings and wisdom texts emphasized the importance of respecting the poor to enrich the values of solidarity and social justice. Teachings such as Ptahhotep instructed against mocking the poor, as did those of Kagemni and Kheti. Autobiographical texts of rulers like Ankhtify highlighted the promotion of the principle of solidarity by providing bread, beer, and clothing to the poor, avoiding discrimination between the rich and the poor, and combating famine, and assisting widows were believed to be linked to happiness in the afterlife, as it was believed that kindness to the poor and the establishment of justice were paramount. Therefore, the Court of the Dead replaced the societal oversight role.
(abstract t.b.a.)
The analysis of texts and iconography produced in ancient Sudan reveals the existence of a very specific, non-elite and marginalized population whose freedom was clearly restricted but for whom we lack precise definitions: captives, slaves, hostages, prisoners or spoils of war? The depiction of defeated enemies undeniably belongs to a long tradition in the ancient world, as a way of exalting the power of the sovereign who simultaneously protects his land and his people and controls distant territories. In Kushite context, such war imagery – mainly monumental reliefs and elite grave goods – could relate to raiding practices aiming at the capture of men, women and children of different ethnicities, as demonstrated by their distinct facial, clothing or hair characteristics. Although archaeological evidence is lacking and the regular external slave trade in the region is not documented until the late medieval period, slavery is de facto often referred to explain the wealth of the Kushite kingdom of Meroe, as well as that of the later Nubian kingdom of Alodia/Alwa both of which, supposedly, exported abductees to Egypt, the Mediterranean world and the Red Sea.
In this presentation, I would like to address the topic of persons deprived of their liberty by focusing on Kushite representations and textual occurrences of people visibly brought into servitude. This material will be discussed in the frame of recent linguistic evidence as well as ethnographic studies conducted among modern East African populations subject to such practices until recently. While the identification of specific ethnic, cultural or linguistic communities is impossible in most cases, a diachronic study of these images and texts could show chronological preferences. Finally, apart from representations of the enemy in general, reports of foes being slain or enslaved on royal stelae and on some funerary stelae of officials who assumed administrative functions during their lifetime highlight the fact that actual conflicts with neighboring populations – Noba, Blemmyes, Aksumites and others – were commonplace.
Egyptian imagery was significantly shaped by the role of animals. Throughout the history of all ancient communities, animals played a pivotal role, impacting religion, art, economics, and social progress. A highly organized society such as the Egyptians entrusted the capture and care of these creatures to dedicated individuals. Previous studies have shed light on these groups, such as shepherds or beekeepers – personalities with social importance and specific cultural knowledge. Titles such as wHa.w (‘fowlers and fishermen’), kp.w (‘fowlers’) and Ham.w (‘fishermen’) highlight a largely unexplored field. This branch often combines bird-fish catching as an intensive activity that requires detailed knowledge of the animal environment and experience in social collaboration. Thus, this study aims to explore the interdependence between fish and birds in the same ecosystem to gain more insight into the responsible parties for their capture and care.
The doctoral project targets the above-mentioned characters through an interdisciplinary approach, covering the periods of records from the Old to the New Kingdom. Starting from a linguistic and etymological analysis of the terms used to label them, the investigation develops on the iconographic representations (tools, clothes, attitudes, etc.) and mentions in literary and accounting texts. In cases of profitable sources, the identification of the individuals sheds light on how their specific non-epistemic knowledge was transmitted. Moreover, the anthropological approach to the subject and zooarchaeological studies provide a wider understanding of the topic.
The investigation of these personalities and their individual/collective definition will uncover their role within Egyptian society and evolution for about two millennia. A broader scenario related to the organization of recreational places in indoor facilities may also be uncovered. A cross-referenced study of texts, iconography and sociology will unveil the various nuances of these highly specialized figures far from rigid definitions.
According to Ignace J. Gelb’s definition, a prisoner of war is «an individual taken captive as a result of conflict». In ancient Mesopotamia, the representation of war is known since the mid-fourth millennium BCE (the so-called Late Uruk period), as attested in seal impressions bearing scenes with crowds of bound prisoners. In cuneiform sources from the Early Dynastic I period (ca. 2900 BCE) onward, captive people are referred to as šaga – a Sumerian term written logographically as LU₂×EŠ₂ (and variants), i.e. using the sign for rope superimposed to the one for person. These early sources clearly speak for a shared figurative code, which will be further taken up and reformulated in monumental terms throughout early Mesopotamian history. The representation of people bound in fetters becomes in fact a figurative topos typical of standards and inlays from across Mesopotamia and Syria. In this perspective, the aim of this contribution is to inquire the social history of the šaga people during the IIIrd millennium BCE by means of visual and written representations. To this extent, the best case study is provided by the Prisoner Plaque from Kiš. Dated to the Early Dynastic II period, this artefact consists of two joining pieces of translucent green alabaster: the “recto” side is decorated with a flat relief with a depiction of two unnamed soldiers carrying weapons of the defeated enemies; the “verso” side bears a six-column inscription with a list of 36.000 captives from twenty-five locations, which appear to have been assigned to work in various orchards and threshing floors. The main topic that links the two faces of the Plaque is the commemoration of war victory and its outcome. Remarkably, prisoners of war are not actually depicted on the visual side of the narrative. Instead, they are reduced to a mere administrative list in the inscribed side. Based on a comparative analysis of selected monumental representations of the war theme from the IIIrd millennium BCE, the purpose of this study is to explore the microhistory of this elusive socio-professional class who went from being kings, nobles, common man and women, children, to becoming property of the Mesopotamian state elite.
(abstract t.b.a.)
This presentation will focus on the use of archaeological data unearthed from domestic contexts to reconstruct part of the everyday life of their inhabitants, providing a snapshot of non-elite daily life in an Egyptian settlement embedded within the Nile Delta countryside during the first half of the 5th century CE. In Egyptian archaeology, many resources have been devoted to the study of larger structures, often of an administrative, mortuary, public, and religious nature, primarily related to the secular and religious elite; fewer were dedicated to the study of the smaller and at times less sophisticated buildings related to common people. Fortunately, the abundance of textual evidence retrieved from papyrological finds has rendered Egypt a unique source of information concerning the everyday aspects of life in the towns and villages from which they were unearthed, particularly those spanning between the Ptolemaic and Late Roman periods. However, while papyri can yield details that can hardly be inferred from other archaeological data, that information is often different from that retrieved archaeologically. Additionally, in challenging environments such as that of the Nile Delta, whose humid conditions are detrimental to organic preservation, there is almost no textual information on how people conducted their lives. To compensate for this dearth, there is still a tendency to use data from other regions and better-preserved contexts, even though they may over-generalize, misrepresent, and even underestimate the degree of variability that may have existed. The new research results from recent excavations I present here illustrate what could be inferred archaeologically from the poorly preserved remains of a mudbrick house – situated within a bustling residential district – about the daily life of a household living at the Western Nile Delta site of Kom al-Ahmer, deep within the hinterland of Alexandria.
As early as Badarian culture in predynastic Egypt (4000-3800 B.C.) glazed steatite beaded objects were used as burial equipment. Not surprising that the Egyptian workers developed their skills in glazing; to decorate the wall tiles of the funerary apartment in the Step Pyramid of the king Netjerykhet (Djoser) in the Old Kingdom, early Third Dynasty (c. 2667–2648 B.C.). The glazed faience amulets and other objects were dominant in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2025–1700 B.C.). New techniques were used by the glass artisans to create complete colorful cosmetic containers and other diverse forms of vessels and glass production in the New Kingdom (c. 1570–1069 B.C.). Despite the fact that the copper beads were uncovered in the Badarian burial pits too, the metallurgical and jewelry workers were depicted in the royal tombs or high officials’ mastabas and, many other craftsmen, no trace of the glass workers was found in artistic or textual materials.
Medical-magical texts and the materials within their spells offer a rare insight to the religious practices of Egyptians in the context of daily life. Previous scholarship has examined the various ingredients in these texts, particularly the numerous plants and animal products, the religious underpinnings of the prescriptions and incantations, and the extent to which these magical practices were accessible to those outside the literary elite. As objects generally more accessible to the general population, figurines, particularly female figurines, have been the recent focus of significant research, ranging from typologies of figurines from specific sites, treatises on specific figurine types, and studies of whether such objects were subject to ritual breakage. However, there has so far been little work on the archaeological context of those figurines mentioned in medical-magical text. As a result, we lack an integrated understanding of the use of these objects in daily ritual magic. This research analyses figurines in the context of medical-magical texts and the archaeological record, seeking to understand which types of spells used certain types of figurines and how such selections were reflected in the material context.
(abstract t.b.a.)
Opportunity for improved understanding of the Babylonian rural social landscape in the 6th-5th century BCE was afforded by the publication of the cuneiform economic texts in the Yaḫūdu corpus over the last decade. This corpus of about 250 texts from central Babylonia forms the largest group of texts directly pertaining to and written in rural Babylonia in the 1st millennium BCE. Previously available sources had not allowed for the development of a rich understanding of rural life, so that research on social history has been largely about urban and elite people. In my research investigating immigrant life and identity in this countryside region, I discovered evidence for a dichotomy between the Judean farming peasantry of the village of Yaḫūdu and those who I term the “rural local elite” of that community. By that I mean local persons in rural contexts who are community leaders and/or have achieved a modicum of economic prosperity so that they no longer solely rely on direct production labor to support themselves and their families.
In this paper, I will explain how I interrogate economic texts for their social data, how I came to recognize the social strata, and consequently the understanding I developed of the rural local elite. Although there is no specific designation for these people in the ancient texts and they may not have been considered a group then, I developed this semi-emic concept based on the social, familial, geographic, political, and economic means available to these persons. I will provide examples of such families and individuals, and present the imperial/state geographic and administrative organizational contexts in which they lived, which played a large part in shaping their social circumstances. I will discuss the relationship between rural local elite and urban, elite society, as well as the contexts in which ethnic Judeans are mentioned in urban, elite contexts. Finally, I will outline recent sociological and socioeconomic studies about rural local elite and place my understandings within this developing theoretical framework.
Despite extensive research on Egypt’s First Intermediate Period (FIP), there remains a significant gap in our knowledge regarding the social history of women during this period. Historically, information has derived primarily from biographical inscriptions that sometimes detail their involvement in economic or religious roles. They have been subsumed into female title studies of the Old and Middle Kingdom periods. Existing scholarship centers on biographies of exceptional women or significant inscriptions regarding royal and elite women. The FIP women, however, lived in a time of regional political conflict, civil war, immigration of foreign people, environmental issues and the inversion of the social hierarchy with increasing prosperity for the non-elites, and advanced displays of selfhood for all population segments.
(abstract t.b.a.)
This paper explores possible paths of interaction between the worlds of the ‘owners’, ‘users’ and ‘manufacturers’ of ancient Egyptian clay figurines (Middle Bronze Age Egypt and Nubia, c. 2000–1550 BC). Clay artefacts, as well as the people that manufactured them, have remained particularly invisible entities within ancient Egyptian material culture and society and have been mostly associated with the ‘lower’ classes and lesser degrees of creativity, skill and intellectual process. Being found also within the funerary assemblages of elite cemeteries, however, the objects must have played a significant role in the mortuary belief system of the higher social classes and must have been appealing to them despite the use of ‘common’ materials. Clay figurines have also been found abundantly in domestic contexts and to some extent in cultic contexts, suggesting that their lifespan may have crossed the borders between daily use and funerary purpose, between ‘folk-culture’ and state-influenced culture, between higher and lower classes.
The paper examines how archaeological contexts contribute to understanding the social background(s) of the people that were involved in the manufacture, use and discard of clay figurines and how their worlds may have interacted.
Merchants (Swy.tj) are attested mostly in documents from the later New Kingdom onwards. Whereas some merchants might have had intense contact with the court or the temple, others had much less institutionalized roles, as they were involved in the tomb robberies of the 20th dynasty. Their social status thus varied greatly, but generally only few of them left monumental evidence: a couple of stelae from Saqqara mention “chief merchants” and at the moment barely one tomb, belonging to Pabes, “Royal Scribe of the Lord of the Two Lands” and “Supervisor of Merchants”, also located in Saqqara, attests to the possibility of their reaching higher ranks. However, Qenna, a simple Swy.tj (not an overseer thereof!) had apparently enough means and the right connections to commission one of the currently only four funerary manuscripts attested bearing text sections in polychrome hieroglyphs, as opposed to the usual black linear inscriptions. Furthermore, differently to the manuscripts belonging to the Royal Commander Nakht or to the God’s Father Yuya, Qenna’s Book of the Dead features a very long polychrome inscription, covering six sheets and reporting a hymn, and not simply a caption to a scene. Despite apparently not having connections to the royal court, the manuscript shows that Qenna was able to procure a high prestige artefact with quite rare features.
Through a visual and art-historical approach, the paper will analyse the vignettes and palaeography of the polychrome sections and investigate how a merchant like Qenna fashioned his self-representation based on elite models taken not only from contemporaneous manuscripts, but also from elite tombs, where both the textual genre (hymn) and the graphic register (polychrome hieroglyphs) originally stem.
The diplomatic interactions between the empires of the LBA have been deeply investigated from different points of view. Thanks to the international archives, a multilevel network of exchanges has been analyzed and highlighted, starting from the classical “gift-exchange”, which mainly consisted of raw materials and luxury goods, but also including various kinds of specialists (along with their skills, knowledge, and instruments).
This contribution focuses on the physicians who played a significant role in the international landscape of the LBA. They could be requested by foreign courts and sent by their kings in other countries where their expertise was required: this specific “human” gift-exchange was (presumably) “temporary”, as these specialists were intended to return home, sooner or later. Unfortunately, these physicians were (and still are) mostly “unnamed”, as the illnesses they were meant to cure were very often “untold”: their anonymity, along with the incompleteness of the archives and the lacunae of some tablets, prevents us from fully understanding and following their fates. Nevertheless, some considerations can be made: these physicians likely belonged to the elite of their native kingdom, as it can be hypothesized that a king would never send a non-elite doctor to another royal court. It is also reasonable to assume that these specialists were considered and treated as high-status individuals at the foreign court, thus moving from one elite to another. At the same time, it is extremely difficult to determine the criteria used by the king to select the specialist to dispatch. Could their being unnamed and their destinies untold be considered evidence that they did not belong to the highest levels of the elite? Or, conversely, could their elite status be enhanced at the court that “adopted” them?
(abstract t.b.a.)
Understanding the social status of individuals through grave goods has long been a challenge in Egyptology. I contend that two key concepts underlie this challenge: the understanding that the deceased did not bury themselves and the notion of cultural cohesion. The former suggests that grave goods may not reflect the wishes of the deceased, but rather the choices of those who prepared the burial. Cultural cohesion in Ancient Egypt, as highlighted by Bussmann, “is more often assumed than demonstrated or discussed.” This presents us with two fundamental questions: why specific grave goods were selected for burial, and to what extent – if at all – were they influenced by elite culture or religion? Archaeological studies from various cultures have suggested several reasons for the deposition of grave goods: memory, to display or manipulate social identity, or to include personal possessions of the deceased. These perspectives challenge the assumption that grave goods directly indicate the social status of the deceased in life, proposing instead that there may be more reasons for their deposition than mere emulation of “prestige goods”. Bowles, Smith, and Mulder have identified three categories of wealth: material (resources), embodied (personal skills), and relational (position in society and social networks). This is consistent with Bussmann’s idea that social status is primarily expressed through “perishable materials and intangible means”. Consequently, grave goods cannot be simply interpreted as a materialization of social differentiation; rather, they were part of complex relationships that reflect the agency of individuals. Data from royal and non-elite cemeteries in Napatan Nubia (750–300 BCE) show the different ways in which both groups deposited amulets with the dead, illustrating the nuances of social expression beyond the elite sphere.
In this paper, I propose to analyze this data through a bottom-up approach to understand social status, focusing on non-elite groups not merely as people seeking to emulate the material culture of the elite, but as individuals with agency who were part of complex social relations and had different ways to express social status.
Food is an active agent in the creation of social structure, economy, and personal identity. Contextualized analysis of food remains from the archaeological record has served as a powerful lens for archaeologists, anthropologists, and social historians to understand social relations, cultural interactions, and the engendered experiences of individuals in the past, especially in non-elite contexts.
This paper presents different aspects of the social history of non-elite populations from the site of Deir el Ballas, in Upper Egypt from the lens of food. The site features a palace dated to the reigns of Kings Seqenenre Djehuty-Aa and Ahmose (ca. 1560–1525 BC), a mudbrick platform that may have served as an observation post, an administrative structure and a workers’ village, with over 70 houses. These houses were abandoned and reused by a non-elite population as a cemetery (Cemetery 1 200), excavated by Reisner between 1900-1901. The cemetery was used between the late 17th Dynasty and the early 19th Dynasty, with the most usage occurring in the early 18th Dynasty.
Food offerings including botanical remains were found in 197 tombs, including wild food species, reflecting regional recipes of food offerings, as well as imported species such as domesticated watermelon, pomegranate, and juniper berries. Material cultures found in these graves include scarabs, amulets, and beads made of faience, glass, and stone. Kerma beaker ware, Nubian cooking ware, and Cypriot/Eastern Mediterranean wares were also found in some tombs. Some tombs included richer plant biodiversity in their food offerings, including imported fruit species such as juniper, pomegranate and domesticated watermelon. Such tombs included richer material culture such as inscribed scarabs. The results of this interdisciplinary analysis of food offerings indicates that even among non-elites, some individuals seem to have been better-off compared to others with access to imported food species and more diverse materials cultures. It also shows that the concept of food-offerings in ancient Egypt, was not fixed but was shaped and reshaped by Egypt’s cross cultural interactions.
(abstract t.b.a.)
During the Ramesside period, Thebes became an important place of production of private stelae, reflecting the profound religious and funerary importance of the region. Through a detailed analysis of the preserved stelae, examining distribution maps, characteristics, styles, etc., it is possible to obtain information about the stelae makers. This study aims to distinguish stylistic groups that may correspond to different Theban workshops. Little is known about these workshops and craftsmen. Although the Deir el-Medina community provides the names of some sculptors or painters who may have been involved in the production of these objects, is it possible to identify stylistic similarities between them? Can private stelae be grouped according to their style or assigned to a particular workshop? Can the same be done throughout the Theban area? What can we learn about the stelae makers? This article aims to present the preliminary results of an ongoing project studying the workshops and production of private stelae in New Kingdom Thebes.
This paper will examine the utilization of ritual linen in funerary culture of non-elite ancient Egyptian communities, employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines art historical analysis with textual evidence. While previous research has primarily focused on elite burial practices and rituals, this study seeks to shed light on the religious and social practices of the broader populace. Through an examination of iconography and texts, the author aims to illuminate the significance and value of ritual linen in non-elite contexts.
Drawing upon art historical analytic methodology, the critical cross-analysis of visual and written sources will be crucial to assess the importance and esteemed status attributed to ritual linen. By interrogating representations and mentions of linen in tomb and temple decorations and texts, as well as other written sources, the author aims to explore the means used by non-elite individuals to access funerary commemoration and adopted symbols and practices from elite culture. The key issues addressed in the paper will focus on what kinds of ritual linen were considered valid or approved for use in funerary practices outside elite class and why, what specific qualities of linen were valued as prestigious and precious within those communities, and whether the rendering of ritual linen in their funerary culture was any different than in elite contexts.
Overall, this paper will offer new insights into the social dynamics as well as the religious and cultural significance of ritual linen among ancient Egyptians outside the elite class. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach and integrating evidence from iconography and texts, it will contribute to a deeper understanding of the funerary culture of non-elite ancient Egyptian communities.