Conclusion Ethnic Identities in Ancient Egypt and the Identity Of

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Conclusion

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Ethnic Identities in Ancient Egypt and the Identity of Egyptology: Towards a “Trans-Egyptology”

Thomas Schneider University of British Columbia [email protected]

In his 2006 contribution, “What is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?,”1 Kanchan Chandra defined that “ethnic identities are a subset of identity categories in which eligibility for membership is determined by attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent”. The two important conclusions that can be drawn from the contributions in this volume pertain to who determines the (purported) membership in the categories of ethnic membership. The prescriptive (rather than descriptive) categorization of peo- ple as “Egyptians,” “Asiatics,” “Libyans,” and “Nubians” occurred in Egyptian documents of state ideology but has also been a major force in modern, “colonial” scholarship. In reality, these categorizations were contingent on social and cultural factors among the ancient populations themselves, and fluid. Uroš Matić (“De-colonizing historiography and archaeology of Ancient Egypt and Nubia”) shows to what extent racist and colonial categories have shaped the ways Egyptological scholarship has assessed ethnic identities with regard to ancient Egypt. For the specific case of the Hyksos, Danielle Candelora (“Entangled in Orientalism: How the Hyksos Became a Race”) carries out a similar assessment of past misconceptions. With regard to an ongoing tendency in recent scholarship and public discourse to uphold a narrative of Hyksos

1 K. Chandra. “What is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 397–424 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.9.062404.170715.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/18741665-12340049Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:29:20PM via free access 244 Schneider identity as atypical for, and detrimental to, Egyptian national culture, Thomas Schneider (“Hyksos Research in Egyptology and Egypt’s Public Imagination: A Brief Assessment of Fifty Years of Assessments”) postulates that this reveals a disciplinary conflict that sees Egyptology as “infiltrated” by Near Eastern Archaeology. Uroš Matić’s second contribution (“‘Execration’ of Nubians in Avaris? A case of mistaken ethnic identity and hidden archaeological theory”) is a critique of an archaeological case study, the purported evidence for Nubians in two execration pits at Tell el-Daba. He posits that this false identification is owed precisely to scholarly misconceptions about (presumed) attributes of ethnic identity that have been imposed on the archaeological record. These four critiques of how past and present research determined ethnic membership and also membership in an accepted tradition of scholarship, are contrasted in the present volume by four studies of how membership in ethnic and other identities played out in actual society. A complex and volatile situation of how identity was constructed is visible from a careful observation of available sources, a methodological require- ment called for by Candelora’s article mentioned above. Stuart Tyson Smith (“Ethnicity: Constructions of Self and Other in Ancient Egypt”) adopts a multi- scalar approach that seeks for “the creation of difference using particular markers in particular cultural contexts,” whereby ethnicity must not be seen as stable in an essentialist way, but “ultimately fluid and situationally contingent,” with multicultural sites such as Avaris, Gebelein, Askut and Tombos as case studies. Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia (“Elusive ‘Libyans’: Identities, Lifestyles, and Mobile Populations in NE Africa [late 4th–early 2nd millennium BCE]”) shows how the assignment of ethnic membership by the Egyptian state, focus- ing on a model of marked identity and territorial exclusion/inclusion, does not find easy correlates in the populations demarcated as “Libyan” where diverse lifestyles, forms of economic subsistence, and ethnic affiliation coexisted side by side. Kate Liszka (“Discerning Ancient Identity: The Case of Aashyet’s Sarcophagus [JE 47267]”) demonstrates how a person’s multiple identities intersect in their portrayal on one famous object—what attributes Aashyet selected to substantiate herself as a member of the identity categories of ethnicity, gender, age, and religion. Finally, Christelle Fischer-Bovet (“Official Identity and Ethnicity: Comparing Ptolemaic and Early Roman Egypt”) demonstrates how differently the state authorities prioritized membership in the identity categories of occupation, social status, citizenship, and ethnicity, and how as a consequence, social status became dominant in legal and fiscal mat- ters, and ethnicity became irrelevant. The contributions assembled here illustrate the need to think of a transdisciplinary approach that is not limited by membership in the discipline

Journal of Egyptian HistoryDownloaded 11from (2018) Brill.com09/25/2021 243–246 01:29:20PM via free access Towards a “Trans-Egyptology” 245 of Egyptology with its traditional attributes of adherence to one nation’s culture and intellectual compartmentalization. Transdisciplinarity reflects a transcendence of disciplinary paradigms as a basis for organizing knowl- edge, inquiry, and teaching.2 For Egyptology, this was most clearly outlined by Antonio Loprieno in a public lecture presented to the 2001 annual German Egyptological conference at Münster and published subsequently in 2003.3 He distinguished between the two different goals of (modernist) interdisci- plinarity versus (postmodernist) transdisciplinarity. In this view, traditional interdisciplinary research would have aimed at reconstructing past reality (Realität) by contextualizing evidence horizontally by reference to sister dis- ciplines that were deemed objectively and methodologically similar. In turn, transdisciplinary research would aim to reconstruct potential substantiality (Wirklichkeit) by reference to vertical concepts of much larger relevance. In this respect, Loprieno singled out in particular the hybridity of a site like Tell el-Daba/Avaris:

The actual results show the degree of relevance of this transdisciplinary approach in Egyptian archaeology … Exemplarily, I recall here the com- prehensive vision of a cultural history that the wide-spanning studies of settlement remains (e.g., from Tell el-Dabʿa) are able to evoke in their dialectic engagement of social structures and intercultural contacts. “History” is, in a more absolute way, the umbrella term under which to subsume in this case transdisciplinarity: Transdisciplinarity in the sense of an unfragmented presentation of one or more types of evidence, of a prioritization of the findings over the things found. Such an approach is able to reach a density of social variation, a multi-scalar diversity within a culture, which, for the first time ever, is able to contextualize the life of the large majority of Egypt’s populace. Such an archaeology goes beyond a mere descriptive inventory of objects and becomes a quintes- sential cultural science through the integrative assessment of the entire evidence from a certain time period. It seems that we are coming closer to a dualistic model: While it is primarily the cultural science of the historical-textual type that (re)constructs the world of the elites, the life of

2 J.H. Bernstein. “Transdisciplinarity: A Review of Its Origins, Development, and Current Is- sues.” Journal of Research Practice 11, issue 1, article R1 (2015). 3 A. Loprieno. “Interdisziplinarität und Transdisziplinarität in der heutigen Ägyptologie.” In Menschenbilder–Bildermenschen. Kunst und Kultur im Alten Ägypten, T. Hofmann and A. Sturm, eds., 227–240. Norderstedt 2003.

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the subelites and the simple populace is becoming gradually comprehen- sible through historical-archaeological research.4

In the same vein, Reinhard Bernbeck, in a miscellany about “archaeology as the future of past subjects”5 has encouraged us to undertake an “archaeology of subjectivization” and as a prerequisite, to “disembody” or “dematerialize” the past—to move away from a survey of found objects to an analysis of the lost subjects of history. In this spirit, the articles in this volume are building stones for a new Egyptology that reconstructs the Wirklichkeit (substantiality) of Egyptian history by deconstructing outdated categories of meaning, by applying theory-in- formed models of interpretation, and by integrating the totality of the evidence. Through their historical and intellectual evolution from 20th century Egyptology towards a genuinely transdisciplinary paradigm, they contribute to shaping what could be labelled the “Trans-Egyptology” of the 21st century.

4 An den tatsächlichen Ergebnissen erkennt man die Brisanz des transdisziplinären Zugangs zur ägyptischen Archäologie. Ich denke hier (…) paradigmatisch an das umfassende Bild der Kulturgeschichte, das die großangelegten Untersuchungen von Siedlungsmaterial (etwa aus Tell el-Dabʿa) in ihrer Dialektik von sozialen Strukturen und interkulturellen Kon- takten an den Tag legen. „Geschichte“ ist überhaupt der Dachbegriff, unter dem in diesem Falle Transdisziplinarität verstanden wird. Transdisziplinarität im Sinne einer nicht zerleg- ten Präsentation eines oder mehrerer Materialtypen, einer Priorität des Befundes über die Funde. So bekommt man eine Dichte an sozialer Variation, an kulturinterner Skalarität, die zum ersten Mal auch das Leben der großen Mehrheit der ägyptischen Bevölkerung zu veror- ten versucht, eine Archäologie, die keine bloße Denkmälerkunde ist und die durch die Ein- bindung des gesamten Materials in einen spezifischen Zeithorizont zur Quintessenz einer Kulturwissenschaft wird. 5 R. Bernbeck. “Archäologie als die Zukunft vergangener Subjekte.” Ethnographisch-archäologi- sche Zeitschrift 56(2015): 16–21 (p. 20: „Vergangenheitsentdinglichung“).

Journal of Egyptian HistoryDownloaded 11from (2018) Brill.com09/25/2021 243–246 01:29:20PM via free access