The human body is both the physical form inhabited by an individual “self” and the medium through which an individual engages with society. Hence the body both shapes and is shaped by an individual’s social roles. In contrast to the cognate fields of archaeology, anthropology, and classics, there has been little explicit discussion or theorization of the body in Egyptology. Some recent works, discussed here, constitute an exception to this trend, but there is much more scope for exploring ancient Egyptian culture through the body, especially as evidenced in works of art and pictorial representation.

Ancient Egyptian rituals for the mummification, burial, and commemoration of the dead as performed in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods are attested by textual sources and visual arts, as well as by the evidence of mummified bodies. The underlying religious beliefs about death and the afterlife are basically the same as those of the Dynastic period. This article surveys these rituals, identifies their intended purpose, and discusses the classifications in use by Egyptologists today.

As developed in the fields of anthropology and sociology, the concept of ethnicity offers one possible approach to analyzing diversity in the population of ancient Egypt. However, it is important that ethnicity not be elided with foreign-ness, as has often been the case in Egyptological literature. Ethnicity is a social construct based on self-image, and thus may be difficult to identify in the ancient sources, where a monolithic uniformity of “Egyptian” versus “other” prevails. A range of sources does suggest that ethnic difference operated within the indigenous population throughout Egyptian history, as would be expected in any complex society. This discussion explores these sources and suggests ways of thinking about the negotiation of ethnic identity in ancient Egypt.