& Weiss (eds) Weiss & Davies Twiston Staring, PERSPECTIVES ON LIVED RELIGION Religion in the ancient world, and ancient Egyptian religion in particular, is often perceived as static, hierarchically ON LIVED RELIGION PERSPECTIVES organised, and centred on priests, tombs, and temples. Engagement with archaeological and textual evidence dispels these beguiling if superficial narratives, however. Individuals and groups continuously shaped their environments, and were shaped by them in turn. This volume explores the ways in which this adaptation, negotiation, and reconstruction of religious understandings took place. The material results of these processes are termed “cultural geography”. The volume examines this “cultural geography” through the study of three vectors of religious agency: religious practices, the transmission of texts and images, and the study of religious landscapes. Bringing together papers by experts in a variety of Egyptological and other disciplines, this volume presents the results of an interdisciplinary workshop held at Leiden University, 7-9 November 2018 and kindly funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Vidi Talent Scheme. PERSPECTIVES ON The 15 papers presented here cover the archaeology of religion and religious practices, landscape archaeology and ‘cultural geography’, textual transmission and adaptation, across not LIVED RELIGION only the history of Egypt from the Early Dynastic to the Christian periods, but perspectives on ancient Sudanese archaeology, Practices - Transmission - Landscape early and medieval south-eastern Asia, and contemporary China. edited by N. Staring, H. Twiston Davies and L. Weiss 21 ISBNSidestone 978-90-8890-792-0 Press Sidestone ISBN: 978-90-8890-792-0 PAPERS ON ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE PALMA 21 LEIDEN MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES 9 789088 907920 PERSPECTIVES ON LIVED RELIGION Sidestone Press PERSPECTIVES ON LIVED RELIGION Practices - Transmission - Landscape edited by N. Staring, H. Twiston Davies and L. Weiss PALMA 21 PAPERS ON ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE LEIDEN MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES © 2019 Rijksmuseum van Oudheden; The individual authors PALMA: Papers on Archaeology of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities (volume 21) Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Photographs cover: Relief-decorated blocks from the north wall of the antechapel of the tomb of Ry, Berlin inv. no. ÄM 7278. Copyright SMB Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, photo: Jürgen Liepe. Volume editors: Nico Staring, Huw Twiston Davies, Lara Weiss. ISBN 978-90-8890-792-0 (softcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-793-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-794-4 (PDF e-book) ISSN 2034-550X Contents Perspectives on Lived Religion: Practices – Transmission – Landscape 7 Nico Staring, Huw Twiston Davies and Lara Weiss 1. Re-awakening Osiris at Umm el-Qaab (Abydos). New Evidence for 15 Votive Offerings and other Religious Practices Julia Budka 2. Appropriation of Territory through Migrant Ritual Practices in 27 Egypt’s Eastern Delta Miriam Müller 3. Prosopographia Memphitica – Analysing Prosopographical Data and 39 Personal Networks from the Memphite Necropolis Anne Herzberg 4. Immortality as the Response of Others? 59 Lara Weiss 5. Practice, Meaning and Intention: Interpreting Votive Objects from 73 Ancient Egypt Richard Bussmann 6. Identifying Christian Burials 85 Mattias Brand 7. The Harpists’ Songs at Saqqara: Transmission, Performance, 97 and Contexts Huw Twiston Davies 8. The Crying Game. Some Thoughts about the “Cow and Calf” Scenes 131 on the Sarcophagi of Aashyt and Kawit Burkhard Backes 9. Human and Material Aspects in the Process of Transmission and 147 Copying the Book of the Dead in the Tomb of Djehuty (TT 11) Lucía Díaz-Iglesias Llanos 10. Vyāsa’s Palimpsest: Tracking Processes of Transmission and 165 Re-creation in Anonymous Sanskrit Literature Peter C. Bisschop 11. In Hathor’s Womb. Shifting Agency of Iconographic Environments: 173 The Private Tombs of the Theban Necropolis under the Prism of Cultural Geography Alexis Den Doncker 12. Epigraphical Dialogues with the Landscape – New Kingdom Rock 191 Inscriptions in Upper Nubia Johannes Auenmüller 13. From Landscape Biography to the Social Dimension of Burial: 207 A View from Memphis, Egypt, c. 1539‑1078 BCE Nico Staring 14. Architectures of Intimidation. Political Ecology and Landscape 225 Manipulation in Early Hindu Southeast Asia Elizabeth A. Cecil 15. Attending the Grave on a Clear Spring Day: Ancient and Modern 243 Linked Ecologies of Religious Life Anna Sun Abbreviations 249 Bibliography 253 Perspectives on Lived Religion Practices – Transmission – Landscape Nico Staring, Huw Twiston Davies and Lara Weiss The current volume addresses lived religion in and beyond ancient Egypt. It challenges the idea that ancient religions were essentially static.1 The subtitle of the book reflects three methodological lenses though which ancient daily life activities can be examined in the material, archaeological, and textual evidence from ancient cultures: ‘practices’, ‘transmission’, and ‘landscape’. These research perspectives stem from the core aspects of the research project, ‘The Walking Dead at Saqqara: The Making of a Cultural Geography’, kindly funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).2 This project studies the cultural geography of Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, and its development (see chapters 4, 7 and 13).3 Saqqara was a centre of major political and religious importance throughout Pharaonic history. Kings and non-royal individuals were buried there from the earliest times onward. Although Egyptian kings were buried elsewhere, Saqqara remained an important cultic area from the New Kingdom to the Late Period (c. 1500‑332 BCE),4 and monumental tombs, funerary temples, and shrines continued to be built there. Having served as a memorial site for non-royal individuals and kings, as well as a centre for the worship of various gods for millennia, Saqqara not only provides chronological depth, but also the necessary thematic breadth, to study the ways in which religion changed and affected the physical environment and contemporary society and how, in turn, contemporary society, and the restrictions and possibilities offered by the environment shaped the site’s cultural geography. With a nod to the successful American TV series, the title ‘The Walking Dead’ emphasises the fact that Saqqara was not exclusively a burial site for the deceased, but also a place for interaction with the living.5 This volume presents a comparative confrontation of the ‘Walking Dead’ approach with other disciplines and an enlargement upon its perspectives. The volume 1 On the lived ancient religion approach see also Albrecht et al. 2018, 568‑593; Rüpke 2012. 2 The project ‘The Walking Dead at Saqqara: The Making of a Cultural Geography’ has kindly been granted as dossier no. 016.Vidi.174.032 within the Vidi‑talent scheme and is hosted at Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) from 1 November 2017 to 31 October 2022. 3 See Weiss 2018 for a project description. 4 The dates used throughout this book are taken from Krauss/Hornung/Warburton 2005, unless stated otherwise. 5 Compare e.g. Gordon 1984. NICO STARING, HUW TWISTON DAVIES AND LARA WEISS 7 includes chapters by specialists not only from the field of This means that the construction of a cultural geography Egyptology, but across a broader span of time and space, in relies on human action and interaction in terms of order to test, criticise, and contextualise methods, as well shaping and controlling the landscape, but also on human as the project’s first results. adaptation to the existing space.15 The “geography of religions” approach within the broader topic of “cultural geography” has tended to focus on religion and “its What is Cultural Geography? relationships with various elements of its human and Cultural geography has its roots as a field of study in the physical settings”.16 Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century study of religious geography,6 and the development of “natural theology”.7 The crystallisation of “cultural geography” as a concept Cultural Geography and the Walking in contemporary thought may be traced to the work of Dead Carl Sauer, who defined a “cultural landscape” as the This volume offers perspectives on the ways in which refashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.8 religion in different places and time periods changed This definition was not reached in a void, but rather and affected physical environments, and how, in turn, represented a reversal of the position dominant prior to restrictions and possibilities offered by the environment this point, that environment shaped religious practice, in could shape a site’s cultural geography. The papers a rather simple, deterministic manner.9 Perhaps the most assembled here examine these processes in the influential early codification of a purely geographical Mediterranean and in South Asia from the Bronze Age geography of religion was established by Paul Fickeler,10 to the Medieval period, and offer a fruitful perspective which emphasised the ways in which religion and on modern China. The starting point for the selection environment act on one another, rather than one of papers is the observation that religion should not influencing the other in a purely linear manner.11 More be perceived as essentially static. The archaeological recently, cultural geographers have defined their field as and textual evidence discussed in this volume