Jordan Miller

This article describes and analyses a zoomorphic siltstone palette housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA 10.176.84). The palette is first situated within the wider corpus of zoomorphic palettes from the Naqada II Period. Considerations of form and design accompanying the development of palettes during Naqada I/II, and comparisons with visually similar forms attested on knife handles and other palettes, suggest that MMA 10.176.84 may represent a fish–antelope composite figure, ‘antelope’ here being broadly defined as a non-domesticated, horned quadruped of the Bovidae family. It is the first example of a palette modelled as such. The social functions of palettes in predynastic southern Egypt are then outlined in order to consider the significance of modelling a palette in this way, as well as to explore implications of the palette’s form for understandings of cultural developments in the late predynastic period.

A survey of the forms and distribution of the hieroglyphic logogram for the town of Qis (qjs). A typology of sign-forms is proposed on the basis of sign lists and selected examples from the Fifth to Nineteenth Dynasties. Patterns in sign-form usage during the Old and Middle Kingdoms are discussed, and reasons for sign-form variation from the Old through New Kingdoms are suggested.

Curved ivory 'wands' found across Egypt conferred magical protection upon individuals by manifesting the apotropaic beings depicted on them. The distinctive range and forms of figures on wands may be the products of conventions of decorum that restricted the use of certain figural types, particularly anthropomorphic ones. The use of emblematic forms that played on the pictoriality of the hieroglyphic script negotiated those constraints. Emblematic forms include figures in the emblematic mode of depiction, as well as emblematic personifications. 'Ontological ligatures' between representations and their subjects meant that such forms manifested the concepts denoted by iconic linguistic signs, with implications for the relationship between 'text' and 'image'. The distribution of wands across Egyptian society, especially when compared with other categories of religious material such as 'underworld books', raises questions concerning the contexts and media of knowledge transmission, and by extension the nature of 'icono-literacy'.

Brief blog entry describing participation in workshops on the study of emotions in museum contexts, using the case study of an ancient Egyptian/Nubian 'swimming girl' cosmetic spoon excavated at Sanam, Sudan (Ashmolean Museum, AN1921.735). Includes link to associated podcast.

Invited public lecture, Centre for Health Humanities, University of Reading (UK), 5 December 2023, held at the Reading Museum in conjunction with the exhibition 'In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient Myths'. Learn about the fearsome qualities of some famous (and lesser-known) supernatural beings from ancient Egypt, the situations in which ancient Egyptians encountered them, and whether we might call them monsters.

Current Research in Egyptology XXIII (Universität Basel, 10–13 September 2023).

In modern thought, images are often conceived as passive representations of the real. This paper evaluates that understanding through the lens of contemporary social anthropology, particularly research into ontology: the ways that different cultures identify and interrelate beings in the world. Employing approaches from art history and sensory archaeology enables two-dimensional paintings and drawings, as well as three-dimensional coffins and statues, to be treated as active subjects that replicate and rework reality. This paper explores how choices of form and materiality created bodies of ink and stone, while ritual performance produced images of flesh and blood. In such a world, the personas of humans and gods were closely connected and carefully controlled. Such an approach complements iconography, whose emergence and predominance in Egyptology may be linked to intellectual trends of the early 20th century. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary method may help to connect Egyptian material with transdisciplinary questions in the humanities and social sciences: what is an image? What constitutes a body? What defines a god? It exemplifies the potential of Egyptian material to rework Western categories, helping to articulate alternative ways of organizing and representing the world.

Overview of the author's research into ontologies of writing and images in ancient Egyptian and Classic Maya cultures, with a review of words often translated as 'hieroglyph' in modern scholarship, as well as a tentative cross-cultural model defining 'hieroglyph' as a state of being.

Looking Beyond the Text: Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 17–19 May 2023).

Focusing on the tomb of king Thutmose III (KV 34), this paper suggests that the well-known, illustrated 'long' Amduat was developed from ancient lists of divine names, probably arranged in tables and reorganized for inscription in tomb contexts. Designers may have collated material of varied origins into a list, configuring images to fit the format of a (mainly) three-register, twelve-tableau series. Such lists should be distinguished from intermediate copies used as templates for inscribing tomb walls. The tabular Amduat 'catalogue', known only from the anteroom of the burial chamber in KV 34, has received comparatively little attention by scholars. I suggest that it represents a collated source list different from that underlying the long version in the burial chamber, but readjusted to incorporate elements of the burial chamber, specifically the king. The catalogue is thus recast as an early and elaborate example of excerpting practices known from other New Kingdom royal contexts, rather than a distinct 'version' of the Amduat.

The second part of this paper explores the reasons for recompiling and monumentalizing content from the Amduat. In view of the encyclopaedic tastes that emerge from some other of Thutmose III's building works, it is suggested that the catalogue was designed as a ready-made source that was, at least notionally, available for copying by future scribes. That motivation offers a counterpart to more familiar royal accounts of sourcing out ancient documents. It memorializes the king within a specifically scribal framework, in which students and connoisseurs visited necropoleis to admire the beauty of sacred sites and to recopy valued works, reflecting shared historical and aesthetic sensibilities.

Invited lecture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 December 2022.

In modern thought, images are often conceived as passive representations of the real. Surveying a selection of drawings, coffins, and statues through the lens of contemporary anthropology, this talk considers how ancient Egyptian images could be active subjects that replicate and rework reality. Choices of iconography and materiality created bodies of ink and stone, while ritual performance produced images of flesh and blood. In such a world, the personas of humans and gods were closely connected and carefully controlled.

Egyptology in Dialogue: Historical Bodies in Relations of Comparisons and Negotiations, Emory University, 3–4 November 2022.

Egyptian descriptions of gods, statues, and embalmed corpses often cross the modern categories of 'image' and 'body'. To engage more effectively with emic concepts, Egyptologists have alternately employed 'lateral comparisons' with material from other cultures in order to reveal conceptual parallels, and adopted conceptual frameworks that emphasize overlaps of the categories of image and body. Though such strategies of analogy and comparison orient investigations toward a 'hidden centre, toward which all relevant statements point' (Bonnet 1999 [1939]: 183), it remains difficult to triangulate and articulate ancient concepts (Candea 2018). By briefly surveying phenomena such as divine syncretism, composite figures of gods, and inscriptions on statues of human beings, this paper suggests that working through the partially overlapping, but still bounded, categories of image and body may in some cases overlook 'perspectivist' features (in the sense of Viveiros de Castro) that are implicit to Egyptian understandings of a blended image–body complex. Such representations of the topic are articulated in a primarily visual discourse and are characterized by an emphasis on the subjectivity of certain image–bodies. Accounting for such discursive features raises the prospect of 'frontally' comparing Egyptological and Egyptian uses of comparison as a means of abstraction, which sharpens complex and fuzzy concepts for heuristic use in specific contexts. It highlights how the discourses of ancient religious initiates and modern academic research in the humanities and social sciences may be tentatively bridged through 'controlled equivocation' (Viveiros de Castro 2004): an eye-to-eye encounter may be impossible, but considering the possibility that the discourses are similarly motivated opens to similarly-oriented viewpoints and a perspective analogous to an emic one.

Rethinking the Visual Aesthetics of Ancient Egyptian Writing (UCL Institute of Archaeology and University of California, Berkeley, 18–20 November 2021)

This paper outlines how the Coffin Text composition commonly known as the Book of Two Ways employs visual elements and procedures that straddle the graphic categories of 'writing' and 'picturing'. Composite figures, which amalgamate two or more images to form new, independent forms, serve as case studies. Such figures are usually treated as ‘hieroglyphic’ assemblages from whose elements chiefly symbolic 'meanings' may be extracted. Such iconographic approaches, dominant in Egyptology, do not fully account for context-specific factors that govern the design of composite figures, which could serve functions apart from expressing meanings. Notable is their ontological dimension, specifically their capacity for enacting or manifesting agentive subjects within ritual settings. A focus on meaning may also explain why examples of composite figures in the hieroglyphic script have received only limited treatment, ranging from brief descriptive works to analyses of specific formal types.

Certain figural representations in the Book of Two Ways arguably borrowed images more common in writing, while others may reconfigure groups of script elements as single, non-linguistic pictures while employing similar graphic syntax. Yet other figures are constituted by writing that is organized and calibrated in ways that allow texts, rather than signs, to function as pictures. These phenomena may arise from the status of the Book of Two Ways as a compilation of originally oral utterances, whose visual representation acquired more strongly illustrative components over time. They problematize the traditional dichotomy between writing and image, but in ways that provoke reassessment of their parameters as graphic marking practices—to borrow the terminology of James Elkins—rather than suggesting that the categorical distinction should be rejected.

Revised version presented at Current Research in Egyptology 2021 (University of the Aegean); preliminary version presented at the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures Colloquia (University of Oxford)

This paper explores some possible functions and registers of images by considering the possible significance of colour in certain contexts. I base my study on the illustrated 'long' version of the Amduat as found in the burial chamber of king Thutmose III, which combines various written elements—continuous text, labels, and transcriptions of cryptographies—with a large number of images.

Written elements on Egyptian manuscripts were primarily rendered in either black or red ink. These colours generally served to distinguish text from paratext, while red ink in particular was often deployed or avoided by virtue of the colour's symbolic value in Egyptian culture. In contexts such as wall decoration, red ink was often used to mark out the structure and organization of decorative programmes, and to execute drafts. Colour contributed to the meaning of written compositions, and facilitated the reading and organization of inscribed media.

In the tomb of Thutmose III, the illustrated 'long' version of the Amduat uses linear hieroglyphs and 'stick figures' coloured both black and red, evoking the appearance of a manuscript. Although the functions of the colours with regard to the Amduat's written elements often fit wider patterns, their significance in the pictorial domain has not yet been extensively explored. Do colours reflect differences in status between images? If so, how does this relate to the ontological statuses of the images as 'representations'? The findings may connect with other practices in the Amduat, such as the use or non-use of specific figural forms, allowing us to better understand the system of representation operating in the composition, and perhaps the relationship between the 'long' version and the Amduat 'catalogue'.

This thesis is a study of figures in Egyptian art which have often been termed 'griffins'. A more neutral physiognomic descriptor, 'hieracoform composite', is proposed for these varied forms. Using examples from the Predynastic period and the Middle Kingdom, I discuss the iconographic and ontological differences between individual examples, highlighting the various processes by which each was constructed, and the factors which fed into these processes. These include wider iconographic conventions structuring the forms of images, the relationship between images and texts, and the role of visual images in the display of cultural knowledge for social ends.

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Studies in Oriental Studies (Egyptology), University of Oxford, Trinity Term 2018.

This dissertation is an analysis of the ancient Egyptian 'serpopard' motif as attested in Predynastic and Middle Kingdom sources. I outline the mechanics of its transfer to Egypt from Near Eastern visual and material culture, and the formal and semantic transformations that accompanied its absorption into indigenous Egyptian cultural and ideological paradigms. I then discuss similar formal and semantic transformations that occurred in the Middle Kingdom, following the motif's adaptation to new contexts of use. A conclusion discusses the relationship between knowledge, meaning, and display, and highlights the importance of differentiating the concepts of image and motif.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Oriental Studies (Egyptology), University of Oxford, Trinity Term 2017.