Discerning Ancient Identity: the Case of Aashyet's Sarcophagus (JE 47267)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 185–207 brill.com/jeh Discerning Ancient Identity: The Case of Aashyet’s Sarcophagus (JE 47267) Kate Liszka California State University, San Bernardino [email protected] Abstract Aashyet’s sarcophagus (JE 47267) offers a unique case for understanding how the intersection of a person’s identities, such as ethnicity, gender, age, or religion, is por- trayed on a funerary object within the historic and religious circumstances of a specific context. Aashyet’s sarcophagus portrays her as a wealthy, elite priestess, and the head- of-household, while being a Nubian who celebrated her non-Egyptian origins. The sarcophagus’s archaeological context also demonstrates the importance of Priestesses of Hathor within Montuhotep II’s funerary complex at Deir el-Bahri for the legitima- tion of his kingship before he unified Egypt, late in his reign. Keywords Deir el-Bahri – Medjay – women – ethnicity – 11th Dynasty – Montuhotep II – burial practice 1 Introduction It is a great pleasure to be able to make a small contribution to a volume of the Journal of Egyptian History dedicated to the theme of ethnicity and “the other” in ancient Egypt. Over the last 20 years, more and more Egyptologists and historians have brought a multidimensional approach to the subject of identity in ancient Egypt with the aid of anthropological theory. Ethnicity is just one part of a person’s identity. Although interactions between Egyptians and non-Egyptians have historically been a topic of Egyptological discourse © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/18741665-12340047Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:18:57PM via free access 186 Liszka from its beginning, most earlier studies had only looked at ethnic stereotypes, that is, how a dominant group defines other groups around them.1 Ethnicity is different from an ethnic stereotype because it is how an individual identifies him/herself. To understand how ancient Egypt worked on a multicultural level, we must look at all aspects of a person’s identity as well as his/her ethnicity in a specific place and time. Throughout its history, ancient Egypt was a multicultural place with non-Egyptians continuously interacting with Egyptians and the Egyptian government, moving to Egypt and acculturating to local Egyptian cultural standards.2 The problem for us as archaeologists and historians is that it is often difficult to focus on this multiculturalism because the extent to which non-Egyptian identity is expressed in our data changes over time and place. When the Egyptian government is highly centralized and local forms of art and burial are more standardized, the unique aspects of individuals often become minimized and lost in our data. However, at times when the Egyptian govern- ment is decentralized, as in the Intermediate Periods, unique local and often multicultural traditions are more readily apparent to historians looking from the outside in.3 Because of the skewed data, the majority of studies dealing with foreigners in Pharaonic Egypt consequently have been based on data from the Intermediate Periods. Even more problematic, the skewing of our data is directly related to the extent to which an ancient person could express his/her unique identi- ties within the culturally reinforced decorum of Egyptian art and language. Imagine you are an ancient Egyptian purchasing an object for your burial.4 You go to craftsmen to buy something. Unless you are very wealthy, you might only be able to purchase a premade object that your name can be carved onto. Although you can express your own identity and personal interests by pick- ing an object that touches on subjects that you like, it is still a choice within a range of prescribed objects and standard inscriptions that the craftsmen were taught to make.5 1 See Smith’s discussion of topos and mimesis in this volume, 119–23. Topos is roughly equiva- lent to ethnic stereotype. 2 See among many others: Smith, Wretched Kush; Schneider, “Foreigners in Egypt.” 3 For example, the Nubian stela of Gebelein (Fischer, “The Nubian Mercenaries of Gebelein”) or the Asiatic burials at Tell el-Dabʿa (Bietak, “From Where Came the Hyksos and Where did They Go?”). 4 For a discussion of the organization and movement of craftsmen as well as the complexities of commissioning objects in the Middle Kingdom, see Oppenheim, “Artists and Workshops.” 5 This anecdote could be applicable to people nowadays, or in any society where there is a specialization of craft production for mortuary culture. Journal of Egyptian HistoryDownloaded from11 (2018) Brill.com09/28/2021 185–207 05:18:57PM via free access Discerning Ancient Identity 187 Only if you are among the wealthiest of Egyptian elites could you afford to commission your own objects and inscriptions to suit yourself. If you are among the fortunate few who can commission tailor-made items, your unique agency and interests might find some expression, and yet the craftsmen are still bound by the standards of Egyptian art and language that they were taught. For example, an elite’s autobiography tells of his life, but it still fits into the standard literary form of the biography that the scribes knew to follow.6 It is only really in the cases where officials directly oversaw the design and work of the artists in their tombs that we start to see the individual agency related to self-identity of the official. Yet these are precious few cases. For example, the nomarch Djehutihotep commissioned a unique scene in his tomb at Deir el-Bersha of the local people erecting a colossal statue of him- self.7 Nevertheless, the composition of that scene still follows the principles of Egyptian art learned by the artists who drew it. Djehutihotep’s identity, power, and control over his nome comes through in his largess of erecting a colossal statue, but because of decorum it does not tell us more about the nomarch’s cult or the people who followed it, or why he wanted to be the focus of a cult, etc. My point is that most often only the wealthiest of ancient Egyptian indi- viduals had the ability to express their individual identities and agency during a time of centralized government in a way still visible to scholars today. But during the Intermediate Periods, when the schooling of craftsmen and scribes occurred on local levels, not reinforced by a centralized government, it was more common for individuals to express their identities because the craftsmen they hired were not as confined by artistic conventions and decorum.8 Yet identity is itself a hard thing to nail down. Ancient people, like modern people, defined themselves by a multitude of dynamic identities that fluidly changed according to the situation they were in, and that had developed from their innate and learned behaviors and beliefs. Identities are both deeply impor- tant to an individual and culturally mediated by social situations. Depending on the circumstances of each social interaction, a person can choose to stress a particular aspect of his or her identity—such as one’s age, gender, ethnicity, status, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation.9 For example, I may choose to stress that I am an educated historian while teaching at my university, or a mother when taking my daughter to swimming classes, or a tenacious and strong student while training in a karate class. All are true, but the emphasis 6 Lichtheim, “Didactic Literature.” 7 Willems, Historical and Archaeological Aspects of Egyptian Funerary Culture, 105–10. 8 Baines, High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt, esp. 11–17. 9 Among many others see Díaz-Andreu and Lucy, “Introduction”; Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity; Schneider, “Foreigners in Egypt”; Hagen, “Local Identities”; Wendrich, “Identity and Personhood”; and Smith, this volume. Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 185–207 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:18:57PM via free access 188 Liszka on each form of identity changes based on the circumstances. We know the same fluidity of identity was true for ancient peoples too, even though many of the aspects are often opaque to us today. For one striking example, the early Middle Kingdom priest and farmer Hekanakht projected an identity in his let- ters to his family that was different from the identity presented to a colleague in another letter. In all of his correspondence, he dynamically emphasized the fact that he was a priest, husband, father, son, landowner, farmer, and head- of-the-family based on changing needs of the situation and the person he was addressing.10 In death, one’s identity changes to what Willeke Wendrich deems the “super- natural identity.”11 For ancient Egyptians, choosing identities to present after death was a more definitive choice than the ones expressed in life because the choice lasted in perpetuity and because the perceived audience included both people who would visit their tombs and the gods. These identities are sometimes visible in the objects commissioned and created in anticipation of death. The objects can sometimes be so meaningful to a person that they can take on a “social agency” of their own,12 especially those that would have been viewed by the living in a tomb. Regardless, the objects created to reflect one’s supernatural identity were still made by Egyptian craftsmen and inevitably reinforce cultural standards, thereby limiting the study of a person’s identities from these objects. This category makes up the majority of objects that schol- ars have access to when studying ancient identity, thereby skewing our dataset. How should scholars study ancient identities—especially that of ethnicity— considering the problems with our evidence? I advocate that the first step in studying any type of ancient identity is to look at the context, original pur- pose, and audience of each piece of evidence because each situation reveals different limitations.