Bodies that Mattered

Bodies are immanent element of socio-cultural negotiation. Since the 19th century, Egyptology has produced vast knowledge on the ancient Egyptian bodies (human, divine, animal), however, mainly by focusing on funerary aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. Different paradigm shifts and turns of the last few decades (hermeneutics, semiotics, social-constructivism, ontology etc.), echo through Egyptology, but are still not part of the dominant discourse. This is also the case for the so-called “body turn”, an important epistemological turning point, that came largely unnoticed in Egyptology. Previous body centred Egyptological publications are either too specific in their focus or too broad in their presentation of Ancient Egyptian corporealities.

To balance this out and reflect the latest state of research, this volume brings together selected contributions from the fields of Egyptology and Northeast African Archaeology. The focus is on both conceptualizations of the bodies by ancient Egyptians and Egyptologists. The topics of the contributions cover familiar but also new aspects. They range from division of labour, disability, gender roles, erotic, magic, fragmented and narrated bodies, other-than-human corporealities, to questions of ethics and the place of Egyptology in current approaches to past bodies. Various textual, pictorial, and archaeological sources, as well as human remains, are analyzed both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

From the theoretical and methodological point of view, the publication provides deeper insights into a number of different approaches and their application to the ancient material (among others: osteoarchaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, semiotics, new materialism, ontology, etc.), which makes the book an important reading for all career stage Egyptologists (students to professionals) and the broader interested public.