Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

This essay traces the intertwined topics of collaboration and multisited ethnography in the writings of anthropologist Sondra Hale on Sudanese artists and art. Hale’s trajectories and movements in and out of Sudan traverse parallel, sometimes overlapping tracks with the artists she studied, championed, and curated. Studying Sudan and its artists may have begun in Khartoum during Hale’s first three-year period there from 1961 to 1964; however, this essay analyzes Hale’s subsequent writings based on the places where she encountered artists, residing abroad and in exile, in Cairo, Asmara, Addis Ababa, Oxford, the Hales’ Los Angeles home, as well as in American venues for meetings of the Sudan Studies Association.

Art creates power1—for the commissioner, the depicted, as well as for the creator [...]

This article examines the material data preserved in king’s coffins used to bury and/or rebury five different kings, which represent the surviving material evidence we have of the art produced to manufacture divinized kingship during the New Kingdom: Seqenenre Taa, Kamose, Thutmose I/Panedjem I, Thutmose III, and Ramses II. All of them were removed from their original 17th and 18th Dynasty sepulchers, stripped of valuable materials, modified, and reused in later cache burials of the 20th, 21st, and 22nd Dynasties by 20th and 21st Dynasty High Priests of Amen, who used these recrafted coffins as a means of claiming their political and ideological legitimacy. Supported with detailed evidence of the five surviving king’s coffins as objects of social and political value and sometimes relying on the coffins recovered from Tutankhamun’s tomb for comparison, this article attempts to reconstruct some of the original material state of this art as a tool of power.

This paper will explore the ritual power and significance of gold for Nubian cultic practitioners at the ancient Egyptian temple of Philae, located at the traditional border between Egypt and Nubia. Philae was a place of cultural, religious, economic, and military interaction between Egyptian and Nubian populations, both of whom engaged in religious practices at the temple, often jointly. Though co-religionists, Nubian practice diverged in specific ways from that of Egyptian priests and practitioners. Long associated with gold, Nubia served as the primary source of this precious metal for ancient Egypt. This paper will explore the presentation of gold by Nubians at the temple of Philae as recorded in hieroglyphic texts that decorate the temple walls and in the words of Nubian visitors who inscribed their prayer texts on the temple walls primarily in the Egyptian language (Demotic), but also in the Meroitic language and in Greek. Additionally, I will describe the unique symbolism and ritual power of gold in the Nubian religious practices at Philae.

This discussion will be centered on one ubiquitous and rather simple Egyptian object type – the wooden container for the human corpse.

In the Twenty-first Dynasty, ancient Egypt was facing a number of economic, political, and religious challenges and transformations. To compensate for a lack of imported resources and subsidized incomes, the Egyptian people were robbing and reusing the tombs of their predecessors. Royal coffins and mummies were collected by priests and placed in tomb caches, supposedly for their protection. In this article, the authors show how a detailed material analysis of the coffins in these caches can help reveal the social history of Egypt at this time. The coffins of Queen Henuttawy prove to be a combination of Eighteenth and Twenty-First Dynasty construction and decoration, and may provide insight into the actions of Third Intermediate Period priests. Following these pieces through to their modern excavation and display in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, it is evident that these objects continue to impact lives, acquiring additional layers of history and social significance.