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"Papers from a seminar held at the University of Copenhagen in September 2006. From the book's Preface: The papers presented in this volume are the results of a seminar held at the University of Copenhagen in September 2006. As implied by the title of the seminar, ‘Being in Ancient Egypt – Thoughts on agency, materiality and cognition’, we wanted to create a forum for presenting and discussing research on ancient Egypt dealing with questions of a more abstract or theoretical nature than those commonly posed in Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology. The theme of the seminar was inspired by the recent theoretical advances in anthropology, archaeology and cognitive linguistics dealing with, inter alia, the topics of agency, materiality and cognition mentioned in the subtitle of the seminar. In our view, such theoretical perspectives offer an important way to supplement more traditional empirical studies of ancient Egyptian sources, as well as raising a number of questions that – while they are not necessarily easily answered – provoke considerations of importance to our understanding of ‘being in ancient Egypt’. The seminar offered opportunities for discussing questions of perception and experience, choice and agency, and conceptions and consciousness from a number of different perspectives. Some of the papers presented here draw overtly on theoretical frameworks from outside the field of Egyptology, while others raise questions of a similar nature without explicit reference outside the field. A common feature for all the papers presented here is their attempt to open up new ways of approaching old questions or to pose completely new questions to well-known material. Contents: 1) A New Look at the Conception of the Human Being in Ancient Egypt (John Gee) 2) Between Identity and Agency in Ancient Egyptian Ritual (Harold M. Hays) 3) Material Agency, Attribution and Experience of Agency in Ancient Egypt: The case of New Kingdom private temple statues (Annette Kjølby) 4) Self-perception and Self-assertion in the Portrait of Senwosret III: New methods for reading a face (Maya Müller) 5) Taking Phenomenology to Heart: Some heuristic remarks on studying ancient Egyptian embodied experience (Rune Nyord) http://cambridge.academia.edu/RuneNyord/Papers/183823/Taking_Phenomenology_to_Heart._Some_heuristic_remarks_on_studying_ancient_Egyptian_embodied_experience 6) Anger and Agency: The role of the emotions in Demotic and earlier narratives (John Tait) 7) Time and Space in Ancient Egypt: The importance of the creation of abstraction (David A. Warburton) Index of Egyptian and Greek words and expressions."
2018 •
Beyond Egyptomania. Objects, Style and Agency
Ancient Egypt: do things matter?2020 •
The deep influence Ancient Egypt has on the modern world is a well-rehearsed topic. The Bible, Greek and Roman sources, and in general a particular modern conceptualizations of the so-called 'western world' have all been identified as key to this. But could it also be that the agency of ancient Egyptian objects themselves played a decisive role? Reflecting on a new book on this theme, attention is given to the question what we actually mean by stating that 'things have agency'. Is this a useful subject at all, and if so, how could it be studied?
In this preliminary exploration of the archaic psychology of Egypt, I utilize the theories of Julian Jaynes who argued for a radical neurocultural plasticity. More specifically, he theorized that: (1) in archaic civilizations individual behavior and by extension sociopolitical order were governed by audio-visual hallucinations interpreted as divine guidance; (2) a preconscious mentality was reflected in Bronze Age languages that lacked robust psycholexicons. After offering some thoughts on hallucinatory experiences as evidenced by the historical record, I focus on the crucial linguo-concept of “heart” and what this might tell us about how language evolved from a period when individuals lacked a clear-cut and precise psychological terminology. Analyses of archaic languages, when doable, should demonstrate that what would become abstract mind‒words were shaped by bodily experiences and concrete metaphors. Next I argue that the ka (spiritual double) and ba (human-headed bird body‒soul) were hallucinated beings. The descendants of the ka and ba are present-day doppelgängers; such autoscopic bodies appear when now vestigial neurostructures that subserved archaic hallucinatory experiences are for some reason activated. If Jaynes’s theories are correct then archaic civilizations lacked a tradition of abstract philosophizing. For example, speculative meditation on mind‒body dualism would be absent. I offer some thoughts on this difficult-to-answer problem. I conclude by suggesting a list of topics that can be explained through the lens of Jaynesian psychology. This essay is intended to challenge fundamental assumptions that have guided Egyptology as well as the study of other ancient civilizations.
Proceedings of the congress "Broadening Horizons 5".
Cognitive Archaeology and the 'Ancient Mind': Mesopotamian motifs in the formation of Egyptian elites in the fourth millennium2020 •
The study of the "ancient mind", with its implications to the material culture and the actions of humans in the past, is currently ongoing. However, only a few segments of the archaeological research are advancing applications of cognitive studies in the field and producing insights inferred from their application. Transformations and variations in the archaeological data, as are figurative representations on objects, could benefit from a non-representational investigation and shed light on areas of the research still under debate. This paper, drawing upon the theory of material engagement, notions of extended and embodied cognition, material symbols, and material agency stemmed from anthropology, aims to introduce a brief outline of how iconographic motifs and styles have the capacity of guiding and influencing human becomingness. From this perspective, novel ways of examining the past may help to trace processes of becoming and to shed light on the interaction between Near East and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium. Notably, the contribution focuses on how the presence of Mesopotamian motifs on specific Egyptian objects actively shaped and produced the basis for the creation of an elite in Egypt. Mostly due to lack in sources of data, the logic behind the processes of simplification and the birth of the Egyptian elites is still partially obscure. However, those periods of change are able to illuminate the importance between people and their cognitive environments and to give us more insights into the processes behind change and stability in the material and social worlds. Through an analysis of objects as partaking to a certain style, it is here advocated that a cognitive approach to figurative motifs has the potential to produce novel insights about social and cultural transformations among people, materials, and their environments.
Thinking Symbols. Interdisciplinary Studies
The body of the pharaoh as symbol? – the Egyptian Pyramid Texts. An anthropological perspective2017 •
The authors of the paper attempt to scrutinise, with reference to contextual arguments, the linguistic image of the body of the pharaoh in Old Kingdom ancient Egyptian religious texts, the so-called Pyramid Texts. The analysis is done from two perspectives, that of an Egyptologist and the other of a cultural anthropologist. We believe the theory of anthropo-poiesis of Francesco Remotti may be of use while interpreting the complexity of the ancient Egyptian beliefs concerning the vital essence that the God share with the pharaoh. It may help to understand the way the Egyptians expressed their religious concepts regarding their ruler. However, we have noted some meaningful differences between ancient Egyptian religious beliefs and other cultures, discrepant patterns: if the manipulation of the human essence has always been studied in anthropology with implication of blood, dolour and painful body modification, in the Egyptian context we discover a milder and more poetic solution of transmission.
Archaeology of Egypt, Sudan and the Levant
Material Culture and Identities in Egyptology. Towards a Better Understanding of Cultural Encounters and their Influence on Material Culture2021 •
The book is devoted to a thorough theoretical discussion of the connection between identity and material culture which forms the backbone of archaeology. The assumed direct relationship between the ‘things’ used in daily life, and aspects of identity such as gender, age or ethnicity to name but a few, is challenged under consideration of post-colonial theories and critically applied to a case study in ancient Egypt. Tell el-Dabca provides exclusively material culture for interpretation including architectural remains, pottery, stone tools, a few stone vessel fragments and other rare items made of stone or shell. The only organic remains which survive in the wet soil conditions are animal bones, whilst materials such as textiles, papyrus, basketry, leather and wood were not preserved. Beside a detailed introduction to the formation and current use of aspects of identity and cultural paradigms, with special regard to archaeology, concepts such as 'entanglement' and 'appropriation', and placement of fusions of material culture of various areas in the theoretical framework are introduced and discussed. It is the aim of this book to open the mind to the creativity manifest in material culture and to the human ingenuity which produced it.
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