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Agents of Construction Ancient Egyptian Rock Inscriptions As Tools of Site Formation and Modern Functional Parallels Journal of Egyptian History �0 (�0�7) �53–��� brill.com/jeh Agents of Construction Ancient Egyptian Rock Inscriptions as Tools of Site Formation and Modern Functional Parallels Marina Wilding Brown Yale University [email protected] Abstract This new analysis of the interaction between graffiti and their physical context examines the functionality of rock inscriptions for the ancient Egyptians and finds that the annex- ation and redefinition of the landscape was a key factor motivating the production of rock art and rock inscriptions spanning the Egyptian Predynastic and Dynastic Periods. Casting off the modern, negative, connotations of “graffiti,” new research comparing ancient and modern graffiti traditions—including a proper understanding of the terri- torial and artistic implications of modern “gang” graffiti—illuminates certain functional parallels and assists in the formulation of a new framework based on Alfred Gell’s theory on the material agency of art and subsequent critiques. In this framework graffiti simul- taneously mark territorial boundaries and work actively to create and maintain territory on an ongoing basis. The application of the framework to an ancient Egyptian case study illuminates the dynamic relationship between rock inscriptions and site formation. Keywords rock art – rock inscriptions – graffiti – gang graffiti – material agency – Alfred Gell – ancient Egypt – ancient Nubia * This paper is a reduced treatment of the theoretical foundation from my dissertation— ‘Keeping Enemies Closer’: Ascribed Material Agency in Ancient Egyptian Rock Inscriptions and the Projection of Presence and Power in Liminal Regions—and represents an introduc- tory treatment of material that forms the topic of my forthcoming monograph on cross-cul- tural traditions of rock art, rock inscription, and graffiti production. I owe many thanks to Professor John Darnell, Dr. David Klotz, and Dr. Tasha Dobbin-Bennett for their comments and guidance. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/�874�665-��340038Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:22:16AM via free access 154 Brown Introduction The liminal desert regions beyond the Egyptian Nile Valley witnessed virtu- ally continuous activity spanning the Predynastic through the Greco-Roman Periods. Nubia, in the south, and the deserts to the east and west of the Nile Valley played host to mining expeditions, military campaigns, surveillance net- works, settlements, and trade caravans. The traces of these activities remain in the form of archaeological remains, narrative texts such as autobiographies or historical annals, and rock-carved texts and images engraved along the ancient routes. While some of the rock inscriptions record longer accounts of desert expeditions, the vast majority of inscriptions are short, consisting of names and titles carved into the landscape. Within Egyptology, the rich tradition of historiography that manifests in de- tailed historical and autobiographical narratives often overshadows the rock inscription corpus, except for those longer accounts that explicitly add to the historical picture.1 However, due to the often marginal nature of these regions and their inhabitants, a consideration of the rock inscription corpus as a whole may facilitate a more complete reconstruction of the Egyptian socio-political landscape. This goal first requires the development of a framework that instru- mentalizes, as socio-historical documents, those laconic rock inscriptions that preserve only names and titles. Thus far, culture-historical approaches have proven insufficient for this purpose.2 This paper contends that a structuralist- functionalist examination of the material efficacy of modern graffiti traditions illuminates the mechanical functionality of rock inscriptions as a tool of site formation and reveals that ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions functioned as affective material agents of social construction with the perceived ability to actively define and redefine the landscape. Background Rock art, rock inscriptions, and graffiti proper coexist for most of the six thou- sand year history of ancient Egypt, a dynamic that exists in no other ancient culture.3 Due to the vast scope of this representational and textual record, 1 Espinel, “Gods in the Red Land,” 91. 2 Brown, Keeping Enemies Closer, 41–56 for an overview of the application of culture-historical, processual, and post-processual approaches to rock art and rock inscription research. 3 In ancient Egypt, rock art, rock inscriptions and graffiti were manifestations of a single glyphic tradition, which subdivides into two groups based on type of canvas—natural or Journal of EgyptianDownloaded History from 10 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 153–211 06:22:16AM via free access Agents of Construction 155 research on these traditions tends to focus on individual corpora rather than the tradition as a whole,4 while simultaneously overlooking anthropological models.5 This approach to research is reinforced by the diversity of the record itself, which exhibits figural and textual offerings on many subjects (religious, historical), in many media (carving, ink), and on a variety of canvasses (rock cliffs, temple walls). Inscriptional content reveals that rock inscription carving was motivated by many different primary goals: they could serve as landmarks; mark boundaries; or serve a ritual function. Rock inscribed boundary stelae, such as those that delineated the city of Amarna under Akhenaten,6 or those that demarcated the southernmost point of New Kingdom Nilotic penetration at Kurgus, are man-made. “Rock inscriptions” and “rock art” are, respectively, texts and images applied to natural surfaces while “graffiti proper” consists of text together with images applied to man- made features (Darnell, “Ancient Egyptian Rock Inscriptions and Graffiti;” Brown, Keeping Enemies Closer, 8–12). For the earliest rock art in Egypt (el-Hosh), dating to ca. 10000–15000 BP see Huyge, “Where are the Fish?,” “L’art le plus Ancient de la Vallé du Nil,” 8–9, and “Hilltops, Silts, and Petroglyphs”; Huyge and Claes, “Art rupestre gravé paléolithique de Haute Égypte,” 26–27. For the latest hieroglyphic and demotic graffiti in Egypt (Philae), dating to AD 394 and AD 452 respectively, see Griffith, Catalogue of the Demotic Graffiti I, 124 (no. 431) and 102–103 (no. 356); ibid, II, pls. 69 (no. 431) and 55 (no. 365); Hoffmann, Ägypten: Kultur und Lebenswelt in griechisch-römischer Zeit, 240–42. 4 Espinel, “Gods in the Red Land,” 92. 5 Scholarly emphasis on the semiotics of predynastic rock art focuses scholarship on examin- ing the links between Egyptian culture, early iconographic symbolism, and the motivating factors behind rock art production, for example, Huyge, “Cosmology, Ideology, and Personal Religious Practice,” 192–194. Conversely, scholarly prioritization of the content of rock in- scriptions privileges the lengthier annalistic inscriptions, resulting in the neglect of more laconic inscriptions and the dynastic rock art filling the deserts, for example Válhala and Červíček, Katalog der Felsbilder publishes the figural inscriptions recorded by the Czech ex- pedition but excluded from Žába, The Rock Inscriptions of Lower Nubia. Similarly, anthro- pological research in its few rare treatments of the Egyptian record prioritizes figural rock art, for example Huyge, “Where are the Fish?” A survey of prominent anthropological pub- lications on rock art reveals only four articles on the Egyptian record: Darnell, “The Narrow Doors of the Desert”; Huyge, “Grandeur in Confined Spaces”; Le Quellec and Huyge, “Rock Art Research in Egypt”; Mairs, “Egyptian ‘Inscriptions’ and Greek ‘Graffiti’.” Of these articles, only those by Darnell and Mairs deal with the inscriptional record—the indigenous, phara- onic, Egyptian record and Greco-Roman traveler’s graffiti, respectively. Similar scholarly la- cunae exists within the field of rock art research (Huyge, “Grandeur in Confined Spaces,” 59). 6 Murnane and Van Siclen, The Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten; Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, 32–35; Thum, “When the Pharaoh Turned the Landscape into a Stela,” 69–70. Journal of Egyptian History 10 (2017) 153–211 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:22:16AM via free access 156 Brown interpreted as serving a territorial function—to mark Egyptian land claims.7 Conversely, temple graffiti or rock inscriptions with religious motifs or content are perceived as serving a ritual function, often to perpetuate the presence of a worshipper in the company of a god.8 But to focus only on these primary mo- tivations may obscure any functional continuity that underlies the tradition as a whole. In seeking to perpetuate their presence and ritual activities at a particular spot, the worshipper claims territory and dedicates it to expressing a personal relationship with a god.9 Thus, both the Kurgus rock inscriptions and temple graffiti function, primarily or secondarily, to create and maintain space through time. In textually demarcating Egyptian territory at the Fourth Cataract, the Kurgus rock inscriptions performed a vital defensive function, similar to that of the Middle Kingdom fortress infrastructure at the Second Cataract.10 The spe- cific mechanisms that allowed a short rock inscription to approximate a dense system of fortified infrastructure are poorly understood due to the absence of emic accounts that explicitly describe the ancient Egyptian perception of rock art and rock inscription functionality. Identifying these mechanisms may clarify
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