The ancient Egyptian scarab is an artistic depiction of the indigenous Egyptian dung beetle. Mythologically, the scarab represented the ability of the sun god to bring about his own rebirth. There are a number of different kinds of scarabs, including heart scarabs, commemorative scarabs, and scarab amulets, indicating their different functions within varying social contexts—from apotropaic to amuletic, socioeconomic, and propagandistic. The blank oval underside of the scarab amulet was an excellent location for the inscription of personal names, kings’ names, apotropaic sayings, or geometric or figural designs. Scarabs are extremely difficult to date; very few are found in archaeological context and most are unprovenanced in private and museum collections.

This dissertation is a study, broadly, of how images and texts were used to create meaning on religious objects through analyzing the compositional designs on ancient Egyptian healing statues of the Late Period (ca. 712-332 B.C.E.). These statues depicted elite individuals, and dense intricate combinations of secret healing spell texts and images were placed on these statues’ bodies. Liquids poured over these statues were charged with healing properties, and once charged, these liquids were used by injured or ill Egyptians for healing. Previous research has often focused on the texts inscribed on these statues but has not examined holistically the interactions of all of the religious elements of these statues, nor these elements’ engagement with the materiality of the statues. The dense compositional designs of these statues offer a unique opportunity to examine the commission and design of a religious object type within the social, political, and economic environment of ancient Egyptian society. I argue that the placement of religious knowledge on these statues was strategic, and that the strategic placement contributed to their religious potency and to the social competition of the depicted individuals via elite commemoration.

I explore this topic by carefully analyzing placement patterns and interactions between texts and images. In many instances, there is clear intentionality behind the placement of the images and texts, driven by the content of the spell; for example, a spell relating to the hand of a god would be written upon the hand of the statue. Thus, it is only through an analysis of the intericonicity and intertextuality of the religious content that we gain a better understanding of their meaning for the Egyptians. My results show that there was variability in the choice of images and texts, which demonstrates the flexibility of the design, and thus indicates that the Egyptian designers and creators intentionally manipulated religious knowledge onto materiality.

I approach this question in seven chapters. After the introduction, I present an overview of the religious practices of the Late Period (Chapter 2) and healing in private religious practices (Chapter 3). Then, I analyze the layout of images (Chapter 4), texts (Chapter 5), and elite commemoration (Chapter 6) before summarizing my conclusions. I identify specific strategies for placement that enhanced the religious functioning of the objects, including visual opposition, textual wrapping, and textual framing. Furthermore, with the same focus on placement, I show how individualizing markers like names and titles occupied areas that were highly visible to the ritual activities so that these statues furthered the commemoration of the elite individuals represented.

The layout design of healing statues shows that many factors can be at play in the materialization of religious objects in ancient Egypt. These objects were enormously creative and innovative products that reveal the agencies of various individuals in adopting and developing their desires and needs in a healing context. They offer a new perspective for thinking about how people interacted with religious traditions to solve immediate health crises directly, to promote their social standing, and to ensure the survival of their names and social selves for eternity.

This dissertation explores the ways in which an ancient society could improve its economic performance after a time of collapse and political fragmentation, taking the transitional period between the Third Intermediate Period (1070-713 BC) and the Late Period (712-332 BC) in Egypt as a case-study. New Institutional Economics provides the broader theoretical foundations for this study, introducing the idea that the habitual aspects (institutions) of a society can have a profound impact on economic performance. I argue that in Late Period Egypt institutional retention enabled resilience and maintained social cohesion after the collapse of the superstructure embodied in the figure of the king at the end of the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC). Within this broader framework, the theoretical discourse on craft specialization has informed my exploration of the modes of production of selected types of funerary artifacts and bureaucratic documents through an assessment of standardization and modularity performed with the aid of RStudio data analysis software. This part of my study has led me to the conclusion that the production of funerary artifacts and bureaucratic documents became more efficient at the end of the Third Intermediate Period, with a shift to the dynamics of producer specialization and organized division of labor. An assessment of the same artifacts through the lens of value theory and complexity theory shows that increased efficiency in the funerary industry and bureaucratic apparatus could be attributed to increased demand generated by expanding elite circles. Lack of correlation between the labor and resources invested in the production of coffins and the titles of the people who were buried in them suggests that political affiliation no longer granted exclusive access to funerary commodities. Likewise, ample use of filiations and the overall detail-oriented layout of documents of private transactions in the Late Period reveals the involvement of third parties in the enforcement of private transactions and the expansion of economic activities on a super-local level. My research shows that more specialized bureaucrats and artisans joined the workforce during the Late Period because more people were engaging in economic enterprises and had acquired enough wealth to afford their own funerary equipment.

Five spreadsheets have been uploaded as supporting materials: the first is a dataset of coffins of the 25th and 26th Dynasties (referred to as Spreadsheet A); the second dataset illustrates the frequency of polychromy in texts on coffins belonging to coffin sets of the 21st Dynasty assessed by Kathlyn M. Cooney (referred to as Spreadsheet B); the third is a dataset of mummy nets of the Late Period (referred to as Spreadsheet C); the fourth is a dataset of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris figures of the Late Period (referred to as Spreadsheet D); the fifth is a dataset of documents recording private transactions from the New Kingdom and the Late Period (referred to as Spreadsheet E). All the variables in each spreadsheet are explained in the relevant chapters and the variables in Spreadsheets A, C, D and E have been used to produce the visualizations presented in this dissertation.

This dissertation examines the social functions of funerary papyri in Egypt in the 21st Dynasty (c. 1070-945 BCE), focusing on the construction and maintenance of the social identity of the Theban priesthood. The aim of this dissertation is to study funerary papyri not just as religious and ritual texts but as objects of use, display, competition, and ownership. These documents can be read as a reflection of the social self, with the identity of the deceased embedded in the illustrated content of each papyrus. To that end, there are four main research perspectives of this study that, while self-contained, are entangled and build upon one another in increasingly complexity to represent the deceased. The four research lenses are gender, temple titles, family relationships, and reuse.

The first perspective – gender – analyses the usage of papyri among women associated with the Theban priesthood. Due to the political and economic crisis of the 21st Dynasty, burials became singular and discrete, allowing women equal access to funerary materiality as compared to their male counterparts for the first time in Egyptian history. With women’s papyri being a comparable dataset to men, this perspective explores the specific choices that women made regarding their funerary assemblages.

Temple titles are the focus of the second research perspective. With the individuals owning the papyri all belonging to the Theban priestly class, the content of papyri is also a direct reflection of priestly status and rank. The exclusivity of certain texts and vignettes coupled with the specific titles for each person can illustrate their position and relative importance in society.

Third, family relationships inform our knowledge of papyri production, acquisition, and usage. With references to family members preserved on many of the papyri, similarities and differences in the construction and composition of the documents reflect kin groups and close associations to other family members. These relationships, in turn, reveal much about social organization and hereditary temple titles in Thebes.

The fourth research perspective focuses on the complicating issue of coffin reuse as it relates to funerary papyri. Because these reused coffins oftentimes did not reflect the social identity of their new owners – sometimes retaining old names, being of the wrong gender for the new owner, or clearly evoking an earlier funerary style – papyri were used in part to fill this void in representation. This last perspective explores the choices made by owners of reused coffin sets regarding the usage of their funerary papyri.

Combining these perspectives, this dissertation aims to understand how material culture can reflect, shape, sustain, or change the social identity of both the individual and the group when faced with disruptive decentralization and social turmoil.

This project reconceptualizes how we conceive of Hyksos identity, primarily through the application of several recent theoretical approaches linked to identity negotiation in contexts of immigration and cultural contact. According to the rhetoric permeating the ancient Egyptian sources the ‘foreign’ Hyksos rule of the Second Intermediate Period was considered a stark deviation from the status quo, the shockwaves of which not only provided the impetus for the New Kingdom Empire, but ensured the vilification of these foreigners well into the Ramesside and Ptolemaic Periods. Furthermore, most Hyksos scholarship is firmly entrenched in this same narrative, duplicating outdated ideas while neglecting both new research on the period and current theory. I redefine the Hyksos, including both the malleability of Hyksos identity as well as the extent and character of Hyksos-Egyptian interaction. In order to fully utilize the sparse evidence available from the Second Intermediate Period, I employ a multidisciplinary approach wherein I analyze several distinct datasets through theoretical frameworks appropriate to their unique characteristics, and compare the results to establish a more nuanced understanding of the Hyksos.

Theories of immigration and cultural interaction stress that both groups involved in contact zones will mutually influence one another, resulting in new or modified aspects of culture, both materially and mentally. Identity in these cases is characterized as flexible and context dependent, as well as socially constructed by oneself and others. This theoretical approach is especially poignant given the current political climate, which is inundated with xenophobia in the face of immigration and forced migration. This mass mobility has created innumerable instances of hybridity and identity negotiation and maintenance in mixed communities. It is possible to study similar cases in the past, such as the Hyksos period, to better understand how this blending occurs, especially in cases of political crisis, and the corresponding effects on both the individual actors involved, as well as their broader societies. It also allows us to study how rhetoric can signal belonging or not, as well as political and ethical vilification of immigrants.

While many forms of violence against human beings are considered taboo, others are considered acceptable or even desirable under certain circumstances. Human sacrifice in particular occurs as a form of state-sanctioned killing in societies throughout time and space. Evidence for human sacrifice in Egypt is sparse and controversial. In this study, I examine archaeological evidence for this practice in ancient Egypt, and human remains that are believed to be the victims of human sacrifice in the early stages of state formation. By assessing examples of human sacrifice around the world and exploring the ways that violence such as human sacrifice may become accepted or even celebrated, I place the possible examples of human sacrifice in Egypt within the broader scholarly conversation of violence, anthropology, and archaeology. Human remains that are believed to represent victims of sacrifice may shed light on the aspects of identity that led to selection of sacrificial victims. Though much of the data from Egypt was excavated over the past few centuries by scholars of various levels of experience, and though standards of excavation and conservation have evolved, it may still be possible to apply modern methods of analysis to old remains and yield new data. In this case, it seems clear that human sacrifice was practice in ancient Egypt, based on the evidence for skeletal trauma on many of the remains, but that the Egyptians viewed human sacrifice as very different from the violence expected of the king, as in smiting motifs or the defense of Egypt’s borders. By exploring the possibilities of old data to reveal new information, we may greatly expand our knowledge not only of the Egyptians but of human societies through history and around the world.

Despite the senses being foundational to how we interact with our environments, archaeologists rarely consider the significance of the senses to past lives. Thus, I examine in this dissertation the extent to which a culture’s understanding of the human body experience (i.e., the senses) affects their society. I argue that sensory experience permeates every aspect of our lives (i.e., the ideological, the social, the economic, and the political), and, by focusing on sensory experience in humanistic studies, we might eliminate false dichotomies (e.g., religious/secular) and discrete categories (e.g., economic/political).

Ancient Egypt serves as a case study for how the senses are central to the ways we organize our lives. Specifically, I investigate the values attributed scent and smelling in New Kingdom Egypt (1550 BCE–1050 BCE)—considering how scented products figured in economic negotiations and across socio-political and religious spheres. After examining the visual, written, and material evidence of scent from New Kingdom Egypt, I argue that the ancient Egyptians employed scent as an organizing feature in their society, from dictating proper etiquette for celebrating holidays and expressing endearment, to praising the gods, healing bodies, and purifying spaces. Pleasant fragrances communicated one’s identity and presence, and also functioned as the manifestation of life itself. To smell was more than a physiological reaction to environmental stimuli but was a physical presence that exerted influence over individuals.

This study, furthermore, demonstrates the dangers of ignoring the senses in humanistic studies. Sensory experiences can be manipulated to control and order populations. In the ancient Egyptian context, the high ideological and social values attributed pleasant scents resulted in a foundational need among the populace for access to sweet-smelling air. In valuing the experience of pleasant scents across social contexts, the demand for these products increased beyond their earlier limited uses. High prices and an emphasis on foreign scents, however, restricted general access to the most desirable aromas. Ultimately, social hierarchies were established and maintained based on access to these products and an industry was developed to support these relationships.

This dissertation demonstrates the ability to use the technological developments observable in objects to reveal long-term shifts in society, and to uncover in-depth information about communities of practice. Through an examination of the significant evidence for woodworking practices in both modern and ancient Egypt, universal aspects of the experience of wood technology are discovered, and compared to those that are context specific. The use of ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology permit this detailed analysis. The religious significance of timber in ancient Egypt, ancient Egyptian woodworking tools, and the position of the woodworker in Egyptian society, are then discussed, to provide the social and practical background necessary to assess the following data: a thorough technical analysis of coffin construction through time. The material evidence is examined in light of its historical context, demonstrating how the use and access to different timbers shifts in light of political and social developments, while the woodworkers must also constantly adapt construction techniques to changes that are largely out of their control. Coffins are shown to be particularly sensitive to these large-scale shifts, as visible elements of social competition and display. At times, the changes in material access and construction are shown to be responsible for major changes to religious beliefs and practices as well. In total, it is clear that technological developments can illustrate fluctuations in the Egyptian economy, religion, and society in a manner that artistic and textual evidence cannot.

This research focuses on the performance and enactment of the royal funeral in antiquity, which is studied through the lens of New Kingdom royal burials in the Valley of the Kings (ca. 1550-1070BC). This allows for a redefinition of how we think about ancient Egyptian royal burials from the perspective of human action, by closely examining what objects were used to create a divine space, how they functioned within the final ceremonies to transfigure a deceased king into a god, and to understand better the transition of power between one ruler and the next. The research is approached holistically, engaging with archaeological, art historical, and textual evidence. The first chapter (Chapter 1) introduces the reader to the research questions, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks that are used while analyzing and investigating the royal funeral in ancient Egypt. The following chapter (Chapter 2) provides the reader with an overview of the landscape of the Valley of the Kings, its topographical features, and spends significant time hypothesizing how the king’s body was moved from their place of death to the final interment in the royal necropolis as well as possible participants and audience members for the king’s burial. The theme of creating a sacred space is woven throughout this chapter, as man-made features of the landscape, like enclosure walls and boundary foot paths, are discussed; examples are derived from both the Valley of the Kings in Luxor as well as the Royal Wadi at Amarna. The following three chapters (Chapters 3-5) are the main case studies for this research, which cover the reigns of Tutankhamun (18th Dynasty), Merenptah (19th Dynasty), and Ramses IV (20th Dynasty). All three provide archaeological, iconographic, textual, and/or material culture remains with which to study the royal funeral. Evidence as preserved is discussed in-depth, including relevant contextual and religious symbolism considerations of specific objects, icons, and/or social histories in order to ground the reader in the material better. The themes of creating the sacred (for both objects and the tomb), the king’s transformation into a divine being in the hereafter, as well as the transition between one ruling party and the next are all dispersed throughout each individual chapter. Finally, the concluding chapter (Chapter 6) summarizes the results of the research and suggests multiple avenues of further research. Here the author postulates about the role(s) of the king and his high officials in the royal funeral, audience participation on the day of the burial, how the king’s burial ensured the successful transition of the deceased into the hereafter, and what the royal funeral meant for manufacturing power and legitimizing rule in ancient Egypt.

This research focuses on the role of textiles and the textile industry during the Egyptian New Kingdom (c. 1550-1070 BCE). The aim of this study is to develop a holistic understanding of the New Kingdom cloth culture through a study of how textiles were valued, how textiles were produced, which institutions and individuals managed and controlled the industry, who were producing the textiles, and how textiles were consumed, exchanged and traded. The research is approached holistically pulling from artistic, archaeology, and textual sources. The first chapter (Chapter 1) introduces the reader to the aims, previous approaches, methodologies, and theoretical approaches that are used throughout. Chapter 2 looks at the value of textiles from an ideological and social perspective to establish why the textile industry was so important to the structuring of New Kingdom society, focusing on ideological texts and rituals, in particular. Chapter 3 provides a comprehensive and up-to-date background into the mechanics of textile production—the fibers used, the techniques from plying and spinning to weaving and post-production technologies, like dyeing and applique. The next two chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) tackle the textile industry during the New Kingdom period. Taking a larger institutional perspective, Chapter 4 interrogates how the textile industry is run and managed by the various institutions at the heart of New Kingdom society through a diachronic analysis of extant textual and art historical evidence. Focus is also placed on household-level production and the individuals overseeing and managing production. On the other hand, Chapter 5 highlights the labors of the marginalized and underrepresented individuals weaving from household to institutional levels. In almost all cases, the individual weavers are from marginalized background based on their gender, ethnicity, and/or socio-economic status. Chapter 6 follows the textile industry to its logical end, examining consumption practices, again highlighting the socio-ideological value of textiles in New Kingdom society. Identity formation through dress is discussed here as well as textile recommodification and reuse. A major focus of this chapter is trade and exchange and the impacts such endeavors had on identity and dress practice. Finally, the concluding chapter (Chapter 7) summarizes the results of this study, as well as the possible avenues for further research. The concluding remarks are organized around the key themes of the study—value, power, and identity. Ultimately, this study concludes that given the high ideological and social valuing of textile in Egyptian culture, the production and management of them were governed by the highest institutions—the palace and temple—adding further value to the commodity through limited access and other restrictive consumption practices. Yet, these fabrics were produced by individuals often hidden in the textual record. Most of the weavers were individuals of marginalized status, usually women and children of lower socio-economic and/or foreign status, with many of them being captured prisoners of war.