R. Nyord (ed.), Concepts in Middle Kingdom Funerary Culture: Proceedings of the Lady Wallis Budge Anniversary Symposium Held at Christ's College, Cambridge, 22 January 2016, 2019
[First paragraph] It is widely recognised that the concept of ka (kꜣ) is one of the most central ... more [First paragraph] It is widely recognised that the concept of ka (kꜣ) is one of the most central in pharaonic Egyptian religion, especially in its earlier phases. However, modern interpretations of the concept have tended to go in one of two directions: either a particular subset of the occurrences of the word is identified as being the most central and a hypothesis based solely on this more limited usage is presented, or (especially in introductions and encyclopaedia entries, etc.) the most frequent uses of the term are simply listed next to each other without any consideration of how they might possibly have been related in the Egyptian view. Methodologically, it seems that the former, more hypothetical, approach is the only alternative to the latter, purely escriptive, and the present paper belongs clearly in the tradition seeking a more or less unified general understanding. Important challenges to such attempts in the past lie not only in the singling out of a particular group of sources as the most important from the outset, but equally in a related tendency to sum up (or even ‘define’) the ancient Egyptian notion in terms of one or two modern concepts. In an attempt to avoid these problems, the interpretation undertaken here builds on the one hand on well-attested general Egyptian religious notions, while on the other broadening the scope enough to incorporate all of the main groups of sources in which the term occurs in the Old and Middle Kingdom.
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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108881494
Targeting the concepts used by modern scholars, the papers address both general methodological questions of how concepts should be developed and used and more specific ones about the history and presuppositions behind particular Egyptological concepts. In so doing, the volume brings to the fore occasionally problematic intellectual baggage that have hindered understanding, as well highlighting new promising avenues of research in ancient Egyptian funerary culture in the Middle Kingdom and more broadly.
The Coffin Texts provide a rich material for studying ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body by providing insights into the underlying structure of the body as a whole and the proper function of individual parts of the body as seen by the ancient Egyptians.
Drawing on cognitive linguistics and phenomenological anthropology, Breathing Flesh presents an analysis of the conceptualisation of the human body and its individual parts in the Coffin Texts. Also discussed are the ritual conceptualisation and use of powerful substances such as ‘magic’, and the role of fertility and procreation in ancient Egyptian mortuary conceptions.
Introduction, table of contents and errata are available from Museum Tusculanum Press: http://www.mtp.hum.ku.dk/details.asp?eln=202870
Reviews
• PalArch: http://www.palarch.nl/wp-content/moje_j_2010_review_of_nyord_r_2009_breathing_flesh_carsten_niebuhr_institute.pdf
• The History Association: http://www.history.org.uk/resources/general_resource_3410_73.html
• Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 106 (2011), pp. 80-83: http://www.oldenbourg-link.com/toc/olzg/106/2"
• Lingua Aegyptia 19 (2011), pp. 375-386
• Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 101 (2011), pp. 501-506: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/volltexte/2016/2874
• Bibliotheca Orientalis 71/3-4 (2014), coll. 403-406: http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3062121&journal_code=BIOR
From the book's Preface:
The papers presented in this volume are the results of a seminar held at the University of Copenhagen in September 2006. As implied by the title of the seminar, ‘Being in Ancient Egypt – Thoughts on agency, materiality and cognition’, we wanted to create a forum for presenting and discussing research on ancient Egypt dealing with questions of a more abstract or theoretical nature than those commonly posed in Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology.
The theme of the seminar was inspired by the recent theoretical advances in anthropology, archaeology and cognitive linguistics dealing with, inter alia, the topics of agency, materiality and cognition mentioned in the subtitle of the seminar. In our view, such theoretical perspectives offer an important way to supplement more traditional empirical studies of ancient Egyptian sources, as well as raising a number of questions that – while they are not necessarily easily answered – provoke considerations of importance to our understanding of ‘being in ancient Egypt’.
The seminar offered opportunities for discussing questions of perception and experience, choice and agency, and conceptions and consciousness from a number of different perspectives. Some of the papers presented here draw overtly on theoretical frameworks from outside the field of Egyptology, while others raise questions of a similar nature without explicit reference outside the field. A common feature for all the papers presented here is their attempt to open up new ways of approaching old questions or to pose completely new questions to well-known material.
Contents:
1) A New Look at the Conception of the Human Being in Ancient Egypt (John Gee)
2) Between Identity and Agency in Ancient Egyptian Ritual (Harold M. Hays)
3) Material Agency, Attribution and Experience of Agency in Ancient Egypt: The case of New Kingdom private temple statues (Annette Kjølby)
4) Self-perception and Self-assertion in the Portrait of Senwosret III: New methods for reading a face (Maya Müller)
5) Taking Phenomenology to Heart: Some heuristic remarks on studying ancient Egyptian embodied experience (Rune Nyord)
http://cambridge.academia.edu/RuneNyord/Papers/183823/Taking_Phenomenology_to_Heart._Some_heuristic_remarks_on_studying_ancient_Egyptian_embodied_experience
6) Anger and Agency: The role of the emotions in Demotic and earlier narratives (John Tait)
7) Time and Space in Ancient Egypt: The importance of the creation of abstraction (David A. Warburton)
Index of Egyptian and Greek words and expressions."
Papers by Rune Nyord
By offering access to culturally, socially, historically, and sensorially different experiential contexts, Comparative Guts allows the visitor a glimpse into the variety and richness of embodied self-definition, human imagination about our (as well as animal) bodies’ physiology and functioning, our embodied exchange with the external world, and the religious significance of the way we are ‘made’ as living creatures. This dive into difference is simultaneously an enlightening illustration of what is common and shared among living beings.
Exzellenzcluster Roots at the CAU Kiel
The funerary objects published in this volume testify amply to the cultural importance of burials in ancient Egypt. In a fundamental sense, what was at stake was the transformation of the deceased person into an ancestor,
and powerful texts, images, and objects all supported this process.
In older scholarship, the overwhelming surviving evidence of ancient Egyptian funerary culture led scholars to think of something like a morbid obsession with death, and it was imagined that the goal was a kind of eternal salvation along the lines of well-known Christian beliefs. But, by
situating Egyptian burial practices within the social setting of the interactions between living descendants and deceased ancestors, it may become easier to appreciate the central importance of the ancestor cult in ancient Egyptian society.
deceased’s manifestation in the next world, which raises important questions concerning the understanding (by the ancient Egyptians as well as Egyptologists) of the subject matter of the spells. In turn, such considerations can provide input to ongoing discussions about the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Egypt.
https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2021/12/ancient-egyptian-texts-afterlife
In the middle of the 24th century BC E, the ancient Egyptian king Wenis introduced an innovation in burial practice that would influence Egyptian mortuary religion profoundly during the following millennia. The interior of earlier royal tombs had remained largely undecorated, while the decorative programme in the mortuary temples where the cult of the dead king was performed focused mainly on the status and achievements of the king on the one hand, and on the performance of his cult on the other.
an entire house. This casuistic concreteness distinguishes this group of texts from many other ritual texts, while the concern with health and wellbeing provides a contrast with other ‘scientific’ texts. Some of the closest parallels in structure, contents, and vocabulary may be found in funerary texts, where the difference is mainly one of different domains. However, as recent work on funerary documents has increasingly questioned their exclusive relevance for the dead, this neat distinction may become muddled in the years to come.
Health problems ascribed to the agency of dead human beings in ancient Egyptian healing texts offer a number of interesting perspectives on cultural classifications of illness and local epistemologies. On the one hand, the problems are rarely described in enough detail to be of much use in discussions of universal versus ‘local biologies’ ( sensu Lock 2001 ). But, on the other hand, they offer a prime example of the ways in which illness is embedded within wider conceptual, experiential and social surroundings. This in turn stresses the need for approaches that allow us to sidestep intuitive dualistic notions of illness in order to come to a better understanding of ancient experience (cf. Nyord 2017 ).
A number of different problems are ascribed in Egyptian medicine to a group of beings known simply as ‘the dead’, often specified further as ‘a male or female dead’ ( Westendorf 1999 : 360–94; Kousoulis 2007 ). It is tempting to see such connections as a purely theoretical construct whereby illnesses are explained by reference to the ‘dead’ as an aetiological principle. In this chapter, I will try to broaden this understanding to include considerations of the ways in which such conceptual aspects interact with embodied experience in the Lebenswelt (‘lifeworld’) of the ancient Egyptians.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108881494
Targeting the concepts used by modern scholars, the papers address both general methodological questions of how concepts should be developed and used and more specific ones about the history and presuppositions behind particular Egyptological concepts. In so doing, the volume brings to the fore occasionally problematic intellectual baggage that have hindered understanding, as well highlighting new promising avenues of research in ancient Egyptian funerary culture in the Middle Kingdom and more broadly.
The Coffin Texts provide a rich material for studying ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body by providing insights into the underlying structure of the body as a whole and the proper function of individual parts of the body as seen by the ancient Egyptians.
Drawing on cognitive linguistics and phenomenological anthropology, Breathing Flesh presents an analysis of the conceptualisation of the human body and its individual parts in the Coffin Texts. Also discussed are the ritual conceptualisation and use of powerful substances such as ‘magic’, and the role of fertility and procreation in ancient Egyptian mortuary conceptions.
Introduction, table of contents and errata are available from Museum Tusculanum Press: http://www.mtp.hum.ku.dk/details.asp?eln=202870
Reviews
• PalArch: http://www.palarch.nl/wp-content/moje_j_2010_review_of_nyord_r_2009_breathing_flesh_carsten_niebuhr_institute.pdf
• The History Association: http://www.history.org.uk/resources/general_resource_3410_73.html
• Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 106 (2011), pp. 80-83: http://www.oldenbourg-link.com/toc/olzg/106/2"
• Lingua Aegyptia 19 (2011), pp. 375-386
• Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 101 (2011), pp. 501-506: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/volltexte/2016/2874
• Bibliotheca Orientalis 71/3-4 (2014), coll. 403-406: http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3062121&journal_code=BIOR
From the book's Preface:
The papers presented in this volume are the results of a seminar held at the University of Copenhagen in September 2006. As implied by the title of the seminar, ‘Being in Ancient Egypt – Thoughts on agency, materiality and cognition’, we wanted to create a forum for presenting and discussing research on ancient Egypt dealing with questions of a more abstract or theoretical nature than those commonly posed in Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology.
The theme of the seminar was inspired by the recent theoretical advances in anthropology, archaeology and cognitive linguistics dealing with, inter alia, the topics of agency, materiality and cognition mentioned in the subtitle of the seminar. In our view, such theoretical perspectives offer an important way to supplement more traditional empirical studies of ancient Egyptian sources, as well as raising a number of questions that – while they are not necessarily easily answered – provoke considerations of importance to our understanding of ‘being in ancient Egypt’.
The seminar offered opportunities for discussing questions of perception and experience, choice and agency, and conceptions and consciousness from a number of different perspectives. Some of the papers presented here draw overtly on theoretical frameworks from outside the field of Egyptology, while others raise questions of a similar nature without explicit reference outside the field. A common feature for all the papers presented here is their attempt to open up new ways of approaching old questions or to pose completely new questions to well-known material.
Contents:
1) A New Look at the Conception of the Human Being in Ancient Egypt (John Gee)
2) Between Identity and Agency in Ancient Egyptian Ritual (Harold M. Hays)
3) Material Agency, Attribution and Experience of Agency in Ancient Egypt: The case of New Kingdom private temple statues (Annette Kjølby)
4) Self-perception and Self-assertion in the Portrait of Senwosret III: New methods for reading a face (Maya Müller)
5) Taking Phenomenology to Heart: Some heuristic remarks on studying ancient Egyptian embodied experience (Rune Nyord)
http://cambridge.academia.edu/RuneNyord/Papers/183823/Taking_Phenomenology_to_Heart._Some_heuristic_remarks_on_studying_ancient_Egyptian_embodied_experience
6) Anger and Agency: The role of the emotions in Demotic and earlier narratives (John Tait)
7) Time and Space in Ancient Egypt: The importance of the creation of abstraction (David A. Warburton)
Index of Egyptian and Greek words and expressions."
By offering access to culturally, socially, historically, and sensorially different experiential contexts, Comparative Guts allows the visitor a glimpse into the variety and richness of embodied self-definition, human imagination about our (as well as animal) bodies’ physiology and functioning, our embodied exchange with the external world, and the religious significance of the way we are ‘made’ as living creatures. This dive into difference is simultaneously an enlightening illustration of what is common and shared among living beings.
Exzellenzcluster Roots at the CAU Kiel
The funerary objects published in this volume testify amply to the cultural importance of burials in ancient Egypt. In a fundamental sense, what was at stake was the transformation of the deceased person into an ancestor,
and powerful texts, images, and objects all supported this process.
In older scholarship, the overwhelming surviving evidence of ancient Egyptian funerary culture led scholars to think of something like a morbid obsession with death, and it was imagined that the goal was a kind of eternal salvation along the lines of well-known Christian beliefs. But, by
situating Egyptian burial practices within the social setting of the interactions between living descendants and deceased ancestors, it may become easier to appreciate the central importance of the ancestor cult in ancient Egyptian society.
deceased’s manifestation in the next world, which raises important questions concerning the understanding (by the ancient Egyptians as well as Egyptologists) of the subject matter of the spells. In turn, such considerations can provide input to ongoing discussions about the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Egypt.
https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2021/12/ancient-egyptian-texts-afterlife
In the middle of the 24th century BC E, the ancient Egyptian king Wenis introduced an innovation in burial practice that would influence Egyptian mortuary religion profoundly during the following millennia. The interior of earlier royal tombs had remained largely undecorated, while the decorative programme in the mortuary temples where the cult of the dead king was performed focused mainly on the status and achievements of the king on the one hand, and on the performance of his cult on the other.
an entire house. This casuistic concreteness distinguishes this group of texts from many other ritual texts, while the concern with health and wellbeing provides a contrast with other ‘scientific’ texts. Some of the closest parallels in structure, contents, and vocabulary may be found in funerary texts, where the difference is mainly one of different domains. However, as recent work on funerary documents has increasingly questioned their exclusive relevance for the dead, this neat distinction may become muddled in the years to come.
Health problems ascribed to the agency of dead human beings in ancient Egyptian healing texts offer a number of interesting perspectives on cultural classifications of illness and local epistemologies. On the one hand, the problems are rarely described in enough detail to be of much use in discussions of universal versus ‘local biologies’ ( sensu Lock 2001 ). But, on the other hand, they offer a prime example of the ways in which illness is embedded within wider conceptual, experiential and social surroundings. This in turn stresses the need for approaches that allow us to sidestep intuitive dualistic notions of illness in order to come to a better understanding of ancient experience (cf. Nyord 2017 ).
A number of different problems are ascribed in Egyptian medicine to a group of beings known simply as ‘the dead’, often specified further as ‘a male or female dead’ ( Westendorf 1999 : 360–94; Kousoulis 2007 ). It is tempting to see such connections as a purely theoretical construct whereby illnesses are explained by reference to the ‘dead’ as an aetiological principle. In this chapter, I will try to broaden this understanding to include considerations of the ways in which such conceptual aspects interact with embodied experience in the Lebenswelt (‘lifeworld’) of the ancient Egyptians.
Figurines like this, representing a woman naked but for jewellery and tattoos and carrying a child on her hip, were placed in ancestral tombs during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 2000–1650 BC). e ancient Egyptians, who regarded dead ancestors as a source of fertility and prosperity, treated the tomb as a site of great power that the living could harness. Depositing figurines in the tomb was one way of doing this, and the inscription on the right leg of this statuette asks that ‘A birth be granted to your daughter Seh’. The petitioner addresses the deceased father, or other male ancestor, of a living woman, invoking his power over his own offspring’s generative capacity.
Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 277 + 40 figures. $110 (cloth).
Wann: Montag, 02. Mai, 18.15h
Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, erfordert aber eine Registrierung über folgenden Link: https://univienna.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Etcu-tqTMrE9dOIHiMiwF9T4Sk1UP87M62
To answer these questions, the lecture brings together different strands of evidence. Most obviously, the iconography, layout, and inscriptions of the models themselves are of prime importance, along with the patterns of their deposition. Another relevant strand of evidence comes from the various more or less exact parallels of the motifs in other periods and media, as these have frequently been deployed to argue for the function or diachronic development of these motifs. Finally, broader Egyptian conceptions of images are important, as the notion of figurines coming to life is certainly attested in ancient Egypt, but only in very specific contexts. Such notions of what an image is and can do are discussed against a wider cross-cultural background as explored in anthropological and art-historical theorizations of the image. In this way, the funerary material can ultimately be allowed to speak to the notion of a ‘model’ also in a more fundamental, theoretical sense.
References
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2015) The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago: HAU Books.
To supplement such a theoretical reading, the paper further draws on the ancient Egyptian image-concept of seshemu, from a root meaning ‘to lead’ or ‘to guide’. The encounter between the modern notion of matter as processual and the ancient concept of (ritual) images as ‘leading’ or ‘guiding’ what they depict yields insight of potential interest beyond the ancient Egyptian material.
This difference in stance between Egyptology and anthropology is used as a point of departure for a discussion of the colonial roots of the discipline of Egyptology which are nowhere more strongly felt than in the interpretation of mortuary religion. The paper argues that in order to ‘take seriously’ ancient Egyptian practices, much of the Victorian baggage still with us in the traditional idea of the ‘quest for immortality’ needs to be rethought, and that not only does recent anthropological work on ontology provide a useful inspiration for this, but the Egyptian material also has a lot to offer in such cross-cultural discussions.
Video recording of session online at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RpLjnIHsAP0.
Concepts in Middle Kingdom Funerary Culture
22 January 2016, Christ’s College, Cambridge
The series Kitab – Egyptology in Focus (sub-series: Material culture of ancient Egypt and Nubia) seeks to provide space for very focused long articles or short books, being a scientific vehicle for those research topics which do not fit neatly into the format of a journal article or a book. Occasionally, the research is too short and concise for a full monograph but too long and structured for a journal article. Therefore, Kitab aims at acting as a focused “container”, which draws the right attention to important concise research, spotlighting the research subject by isolating it in single standing-alone volumes, thus avoiding the research being dispersed between miscellaneous articles in journals and collective volumes. Kitab will also help in speedily communicating the results of a focused research and it makes research outputs immediately available online and in printed versions.
The first sub-series is devoted to the “Material Culture of ancient Egypt and Nubia”.
With special thanks to the conference team: Rachel Barnas (University of California, Berkeley), Beatrice De Faveri (University of California, Berkeley), Walid Elsayed (Sohag University), Maysa Kassem (Fayum University), Jason Silvestri (University of California, Berkeley).
The conference will be live-streamed on Thursday18, Friday 19 and Saturday 20, November 2021