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From viscera to Sons of Horus: reassessing canopic practices in the early first millennium BCE
No full textThe removal and treatment of the viscera through the mummification processes were an
essential and characteristic element of ancient Egyptian funerary culture, traditionally
associated with the preservation of the body for the afterlife. This understanding originates
from Victorian interpretations of death and the body. Several recent studies have used
anthropological concepts and frameworks to challenge these views and gain important new
insights into mummification processes and ancient Egyptian mortuary practices more
generally. Until now, evisceration and canopic practices have only been studied through a
traditional framework—devaluing their importance in broader funerary practices as simply
a necessary step towards preservation of the body. This thesis addresses this limitation by
analysing canopic practices through an alternative interpretative framework and the study
of conceptual and material perspectives.
The approach and analysis outlined in this thesis are grounded in the principles and methods
of ritual practice theory, encompassing both conceptual and material perspectives.
Borrowing from anthropology, the framework of ‘rites of passage’ provides a means to
reinterpret evisceration processes as transformation of corporeal materiality. Within this
framework, an analysis of textual sources and archaeological data is conducted to develop
an emic understanding of canopic practices. The material perspective is addressed using the
framework of material culture, that facilitates an understanding of past and present societies
through the study of the material they created and used. Within this thesis, the key materials
analysed include canopic jars and figurines of the four Sons of Horus. Interpretation of this
material is made within the wider funerary context, from a variety of sites, across a time of
transformative socio-economic change—the early first millennium BCE.
Through application of the alternative interpretative framework to existing concepts and
materials, several new insights into canopic practices have been derived: (i) that the
treatment of the viscera is a ‘rite of passage’—where the viscera are materially and
ontologically transformed into divine entities; (ii) that viscera were conceptualised as
manufacturers of bodily fluids that supported transformation of body materiality; (iii) that
the Sons of Horus played a role as protectors of the deceased; (iv) that canopic jars should
be conceived as embodiments of the Sons of Horus, rather than containers; and (v) that
despite material changes in early first millennium BCE canopic equipment (standard,
pseudo- and dummy canopic jars; wax and wooden figurines), there is conceptual continuity
in the representation of the Sons of Horus in the funerary context. In addition to contributing
new knowledge and understanding of canopic practices, this thesis adds to a growing body
of evidence that enables a more holistic interpretation of Egyptian funerary practices
Self-presentation in Ramessid Egypt
Full text linkElite self-presentation through the biographical genre is a defining element of ancient Egyptian high culture from the Old Kingdom until the Roman period. My thesis centres on the biographical texts produced during the Ramessid period (c. 1280-1070 BCE), a time of significant change in elite domains of representation. Since biography has not been seen as a significant genre of this period, these texts, which are inscribed on statues, stelae, temple walls, and in tombs, have not been gathered together or studied as a corpus. Yet they are a key to exploring the diverse and highly individual ways in which a self could be fashioned and presented. I take a holistic approach to the interpretation of these texts, in order to examine the ways in which they were incorporated into their spatial and visual settings and could extend beyond them. My introduction sets out my aims and the broader anthropological framework which I apply to the Egyptian sources. The following four chapters are case-studies. Chapters two to four are organised according to site (Thebes and el-Mashayikh, Karnak, and Abydos), comparing strategies of self-presentation in tomb and temple contexts. The fourth is thematically oriented, and looks at the image and role of the king in non-royal biographies. In the final chapter, I draw together the results of my individual case-studies, discussing their common textual themes, the interplays of traditional and innovative motifs within them, as well as the implications of their diverse monumental contexts. I hope to demonstrate that the holistic approach I apply is relevant for the study of monumental discourse in other periods in Egyptian history and has the potential to locate the Egyptian material within broader frameworks for the study of premodern societies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Shenhur, Temple of
Full text linkThe Roman Period temple of Isis at Shenhur was built and decorated during the reign of Augustus (30 BCE – 14 CE) through that of Trajan (98 – 117 CE). The site of Shenhur is located between two major cult centers, Koptos and Thebes, in Upper Egypt. While both theological systems were influential at Shenhur, the temple was mainly influenced by that of Koptos; the structure’s decoration thus constituted an important part of the regional cult topography. Excavations in and around the temple have revealed that a colonnade was added to its exterior during the reign of Tiberius or later, and that the structure was used as a habitation during the fifth to seventh centuries CE.status: Publishe
The conquered and the conquerors: representations of warfare and combat in Greek and Egyptian literature
Full text linkThis thesis is a study of the ways in which Greek and Egyptian authors reacted to being conquered, focusing particularly on how these reactions were manifested in representations of war. The point of comparison is the Greek and Egyptian diachronic changes in their depictions of warfare and combat, and how these related to respective changes in geopolitical and military supremacy. To examine these changes, texts are selected from four periods: two Greek periods and two Egyptian; two periods of military supremacy (Greek texts from the early-mid Hellenistic period, c. 300–130 BC, Egyptian texts of the 18th and 19th Dynasties of the New Kingdom, c. 1550–1186 BC) and two later periods under foreign rule (Greek texts from the Imperial period, c. 200–300 AD, Egyptian Demotic texts from the Graeco-Roman period, c. 300 BC–200 AD). A Preface provides dates and locations for the sources, and sets out principles of transliteration and translation. After considering what the purpose and role of comparison is within studies of the ancient world in the Introduction, this thesis moves on to four chapters that cover important concepts repeatedly brought out in representations of war: the nature of war in terms of semantics and temporality; ethnicity (the identity given to both participants and audience by the authors, studied with particular attention paid to the use of similes and comparisons); gender and sexuality (the presence or absence of women in war, and the application of stereotypically masculine or feminine traits); social status (the structuring of society, from the gods down). The Conclusion draws these threads together, summarising how the Greeks and Egyptians reacted – or did not react – and to what extent ideas of resistance are present in the sources. Although the texts of the conquerors display similar attitudes to many of these concepts, a comparison of the changes that took place in Greek and Egyptian representations of war shows that their reactions to being conquered diverge, revealing different approaches to their culture’s loss of military power
Repopulating the court of the seventh pylon at Karnak: A study of graffiti in context
Full text linkThe present work aims to demonstrate the relevance of the study of graffiti in a carefully defined temple context as a means to gain insights into the use and transformation of sacred space by the people who could access it. Access to temples was arguably highly controlled, and probably only restricted groups of people were allowed in certain areas of the temple. This raises important questions concerning temple accessibility, daily movements of temple staff, reactions to religious events, and the functioning of rules of decorum, which established what could conveniently be exhibited on the temple walls and what not, along with their possible breach. Chapter 1 discusses potentials of the study of graffiti in temples and issues of definitions. Here, material agency is proposed as a productive theoretical framework. Comprised in Part I of the thesis are Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the architectural history of the southern processional way in its main phases of transformation (construction, decoration, and partial demolition), while Chapter 3 presents a survey of secondary epigraphy along the southern processional way, with detailed descriptions of graffiti in the court of the seventh pylon. Part II, comprising Chapters 4, 5 and 6, introduces the three categories of graffiti that will be analysed through specific case studies: 1) graffiti as individual’s self-display (Chapter 4); 2) graffiti as individual expressions of devotions (Chapter 5); 3) community graffiti as possible votive loci (Chapter 6). The results of this analysis, discussed in the concluding remarks in Chapter 7, are intended to serve as a point of reference for the study of similar corpora from other Egyptian temples, while providing an approach that may speak to figurative graffiti, still too often neglected, of other ancient civilizations (Nubia, ancient Greece, the Roman empire, etc.)
Beloved of the Ka: Personal names in the complex of Mereruka Meri at Saqqara
Full text linkThis thesis investigates the distinctive ways in which personal names were integrated into the textual and iconographic programme of an ancient Egyptian funerary complex: that of 6th Dynasty vizier Mereruka Meri and his family. The name (rn) was a principal part of the ancient Egyptian person—which also incorporated the body, heart, the kA, and the bA—and the tomb was the primary site for the monumental memorialisation of these aspects of the self. In the context of the ancient Egyptian tomb, the survival of the name was achieved through inscribing it in stone and reaffirming it in speech, thus ensuring that the essence of the deceased lived in the memory of others. The tomb was also a site in which dependants and people associated with the deceased had their names memorialised, either as named figures which were part of the planned reliefs, or which were added (in the manner of ‘graffiti’) to the reliefs sometime after the completion of the tomb’s decoration. This thesis approaches Old Kingdom onomastics from a socio-linguistic and anthropological perspective. The primary enquiry that this thesis seeks to address is how a name’s meaning was materialised in an ancient Egyptian commemorative monument. This is achieved, firstly, by examining the possible meanings in names themselves, with careful attention to the ways in which names communicated the social, geographic, and temporal context (‘deixis’) of their referents. It is secondly achieved through studying the ways in which inscribed names were situationally embedded and contextually bound by the wider visual and architectural setting of the tomb space. Ultimately, I argue that the meanings and orthographies of ancient Egyptian personal names were affected by the ritual space(s) in which they were inscribed
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