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Previously published in Spanish: Baines, J and Frood, E. 2008. Piedad, cambio y exhibición en el Reino Nuevo. Revista del Instituto de Historia Antigua Oriental 15: 75–106.

Elite 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.

An evaluation of evidence from texts of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period which can shed light on the development of the apparently illogical writing of the ancient Egyptian word for chair, and on the practice of adding the hieroglyph for life (ankh) before certain occurrences of royal names in textual environments, with discussion on whether or not this ankh sign should be read as part of the text.

Three New Kingdom statues are analysed — the Louvre statue of Maanakhtef (E 12926), the Cairo statue of Minmose (CG 1203), and the Cairo statue of Paser (CG 630) — in order to study how object agency and multiple aspects of the person are mobilised through their inscriptions, as well as how those texts exploit the statues’ forms. Selected extracts of the texts are presented in translation and discussed, together with descriptions of the statues. It is argued that the ways in which these texts — as well as others touched on here as comparanda — describe their own environments and their own bodies present complex explorations of concepts relating to image-making, audience and personhood.

This thesis investigates the patterns of occurrence of composite figural forms of divine beings in three categories of Egyptian pictorial–verbal religious compositions dating between 2000 and 1400 BCE: the Amduat, Book of Two Ways, and apotropaic wands. Analysis of the Amduat focuses on the burial chamber of Thutmose III (KV 34); study of the Book of Two Ways concentrates on the coffins B1C and B5C (Cairo CG 28083 and JE 37566); images on various wands are treated as selections from a repertoire. Most case studies are ophidian composites that incorporate elements of the bodies of serpents, whose cultural associations in Egypt are well-explored. The thesis argues that composite figures, which conjoin elements of human and animal bodies or parts of inanimate objects, display both ontological and semantic content, and that configurations were constrained by features of context, such as compositional format, multimodality, and decorum. Chapters 1 and 2 establish the theoretical basis of the thesis. Following the terminology of anthropologist Philippe Descola, composite figures are argued to balance interiority (subjectivity and vital force) and physicality (bodily constitution and means of action) in an analogist ontological regime, in which beings are defined and related through metaphor and symbolism. The concept of agency is treated as an aspect of interiority; its dynamics and loci are identified in the Egyptian terms sšmw and jrw. In Chapters 3 to 5, case studies from the three corpora are analysed within the frame of Neil Cohn’s notion of visual language, developed out of research on comics. This concept accommodates varied relationships between beings, images, and hieroglyphic writing by taking account of contextual features while exploiting analytical approaches deriving from art history as well as comics studies. Chapter 6 presents a typology of conceptual structures and discusses sources and transmission between corpora. The composite figure is suggested to be an emic category whose conceptual implications distinguish it from other uses of conjoined elements as a graphic schema, enabling zoomorphic composites to be related to other schemas, notably personifications. A concluding chapter extends the central ideas of the thesis to other corpora, outlines relevant theoretical considerations, and suggests how the methods developed could be extended in their application.

This thesis contributes to the understanding of ancient Egyptian domestic space and the experience of privacy in the Workmen’s Village of Amarna during the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BCE). It provides a new framework with which to investigate domestic space, one not reduced to house units, but which integrates a large dataset from houses (artefacts, architectural features), facilities located outside the enclosure wall (pigpens, the quarry, chapels), and official buildings spatially distributed around the settlement. In addition, the use of anthropologically-orientated frameworks emphasises the relational aspect of domestic life and the way people relate to the surrounding landscape. This research approached dwellings as material culture, as a product and the medium of social relations, and not only as containers for social life. In so doing, it is possible to understand activity areas as arenas for social relations. Phenomenology is critically used and combined with a georeferencing tool (ArcGIS Pro) to understand artefact distribution within the landscape. A holistic approach to the village material offers a more complex picture of domestic space that is extended to the entire settlement. The village is then framed as a large domestic unit which conveys various experiences of privacy not limited to space, but to temporality and to status.

This 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.

This thesis investigates the position and role of the Lebanese city of Byblos in the local and international context of the Late Bronze Age Levant, when the city was a “contact zone” between the Near East and Egypt. In spite of its central role in the regional geopolitical landscape, Byblos has attracted relatively little attention among scholars. This is particularly true for the Late Bronze Age, which however appears as a crucial period, as it saw Byblos passing from being a prosperous and powerful city during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages to become a small and peripheral town in the Iron Age. This thesis addresses this gap in research, aiming to re-contextualise the role, interactions, and development of the city in the regional Late Bronze Age geopolitical landscape. The method adopted, combining archaeological and written evidence, compensates for the scattered nature of the sources and makes it possible to look at the city from di erent perspectives. Various aspects of Byblos’ society are thus reconstructed, and the general development of the city is sketched within a descriptive theoretical framework. There emerges a picture of a dynamic kingdom that went through periods of power and prosperity and of hardship and decline in uenced by micro- and macro-regional economic, strategic, and ideological factors. In particular, it can be shown that the di culties for Byblos started well before the end of the Late Bronze Age and the troubled period that followed. This observation not only highlights the complexity of the processes a ecting Byblos, but it also suggests that focusing the attention at a small scale, looking at the speci cities of the development and interactions of small realities such as those of cities or local kingdoms, is a fruitful approach that can yield new insights to understand the dynamics of the region as a whole.

The 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.).

An evaluation of evidence from texts of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period which can shed light on the development of the apparently illogical writing of the ancient Egyptian word for chair, and on the practice of adding the hieroglyph for life (ankh) before certain occurrences of royal names in textual environments, with discussion on whether or not this ankh sign should be read as part of the text.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of ancient Egyptian kinship in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom (ca 2150–1650 BCE) by exploring how forms of relatedness were displayed in the monumental record. Kinship and marriage are contextually driven sociocultural phenomena that should be approached from the actors' perspective; such an approach can achieve some insight into emic notions of kinship, because monuments were integral to society and contributed to perpetuating and sustaining its fabric. The introduction (chapter 1) presents the theoretical background on which the thesis is based, namely the notion of kinship as process, where relationships can be constructed and reconstructed throughout one’s life. In addition, it provides a working definition of 'kin group', an analytical category that is taken as the primary unit of social analysis that can encompass several ways of being related. Chapter 2 offers a discussion of kinship terminology in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. The focus is less on basic kinship terms than on the little understood terminology for kin groups and how these were presented in the written record. Chapter 3 treats stelae, which constitute the core corpus of material for the thesis. Stelae present a variety of images of kin groups and, moreover, they should be considered within the larger units of which they were part. Many of these stelae are unprovenanced but have been attributed to Abydos. At this site, memorial chapels have been identified archaeologically, and some stelae have been found in association with them. Thus, the site offers a materialisation of constellations of relationships. Possible reconstructions of such chapels – one from Saqqara and two from Abydos – are presented in chapter 4, and the impact they may have had on the social memory of visitors is assessed. Display, presence, and performance were some of the ways in which the social role of those groups was communicated. Chapter 5 is concerned with how change and time may be represented in apparently static objects. On the basis of the model of the developmental cycle of domestic groups first introduced by Meyer Fortes, the dynamism of the social fabric is explored through three case studies of groups at different stages of their developmental cycle. The strategies of survival can be seen pervasively in the monumental record, allowing for a glimpse into time and change in kin groups. The conclusion (chapter 6) offers a holistic approach to the material presented in the thesis, emphasising the ways in which the different theoretical approaches proposed intertwine with the material.