Conclusion Ethnic Identities in Ancient Egypt and the Identity Of

Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 243–246

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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, “colo- nial” 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 sim- ilar 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:10.1163/18741665-12340049 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”) dem- onstrates 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 trans- disciplinary approach that is not limited by membership in the discipline

Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 243–246