Prisoners of War as a Means of Self-Representation: Documental Evidence from Private Sources of the New Kingdom - CRE XVIII, Naples 3-6 May 2017 (original) (raw)
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Since the beginning of the pharaonic civilization, a recurrent trope in the royal ideology is that of the king defeating the ‘Nine Bows’, the foreign countries surrounding Egypt. Royal and private sources often showed the king’s power by representing his ability to defeat his enemies. However, beyond the ideological framework, one of the concrete results of these armed conflicts was the conquer of huge booties consisting of precious goods and prisoners. Especially during the New Kingdom, more sophisticated representations and texts were used to celebrate military events and the so-called Egyptian ‘Imperialism’, providing details about numbers, ethnics, genres and sometimes the final destination of the prisoners. There was also an echo of these themes in literary texts and private sources. Existing studies on this subject deal mostly with narrative scenes and focus on the role of the pharaoh. In my paper I will steer the attention towards the prisoners themselves: subjugated, annihilated but also turned into workers. The evidence analysed in my PhD thesis show that the condition of prisoner was temporary and ceased after the arrival in Egypt, where captives were immediately converted into workers. The interest of this study is thus the distribution of these new inhabitants in the country, the various institutions (temples, army ...) or the people who used them and the social and economic consequences of these installations. The manner in which the prisoners are mentioned in the sources reveals their role in royal ideology and their perception in private or literary sources. In this paper I will presents the main conclusions of my study and the research prospects on this subject.
Since ancient times, kings in Ancient Egypt paid great attention to the representation of defeated enemies found in texts, images on monuments, tombs and other various objects. In all these cases the focus was on representing the power of the pharaoh and his ability to defeat the “Nine Bows”, all the foreign countries surrounding Egypt. For this reason pharaohs included detailed numbers and the ethnic features of the prisoners in the representations. In the New Kingdom it is possible to notice a discontinuity from the old tradition: even if the sources remain full of symbolic meanings in some cases these included details that allow to go beyond mere symbolism and reconstruct the concrete reality of the prisoners deported in Egypt. In this period, Egypt greatly expanded to the detriment of its neighbour states and every pharaoh celebrated these episodes on the monuments of the country. Analysing the exceptional reliefs and the texts from the funeral temple of Ramses III in Medinet Habu, together with the passages from the papyrus Harris I and from the Annals of Thutmosis III, we obtain details which can be used to reconstruct the treatment of prisoners and some features of the defeated people. Together with the image of the king bringing the bonded prisoners in front of the divinity and subjugating them to his power, the sources provide information on the procedures of registration and division of prisoners, on their future tasks and destinations. Civil officers, soldiers and privates were also involved in these processes and inform us, according to their role, on the procedures of handling prisoners (see for example the case of the Vizir Rekhmira) or on the capturing and deportation of enemies, that were offered at a later stage to veterans as a reward for their military value. In my paper I will analyse the most relevant sources with the objective of discussing the transformation of the representation of prisoners from celebrative trophies to real subjects. Do the sources available for the New Kingdom tell us a different reality or conversely do they simply use a new form of symbolism to describe a non-changing situation? In other words, is the discontinuity in the representation of prisoners between Old and New Kingdom real or apparent?
The Pharaoh's Fighters: Early Mercenaries in Egypt
Crossroads III: A Stranger in the House. Foreigners in Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern Societies of the Bronze Age , 2019
Type-setting layout: AGAMA ® poly-grafický ateliér, s.r.o., Praha Print: TNM print, Chlumec nad Cidlinou Abstract: The second millennium BC was a period of unprecedented interconnectedness, characterized by the increasing movement of people in conjunction with the transmission of technologies across the Near East. Employing a Communities of Practice approach, this paper investigates the human networks through which this specialized knowledge might have transferred, suggesting that the interaction between foreign and local military and technological specialists was the locus of this transmission. The Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period were characterized by waves of West Asian immigrants moving into the Eastern Delta, bringing with them their mastery of new production processes and technologies. This period also saw the introduction of West Asian military practices and values, including a corpus of military related Semitic loan words. Therefore, this paper will propose that the mixture of immigrant and Egyptian specialists in hybrid military communities of practice played a major role in this cultural exchange. I will also explore the cultural significance behind the adoption and maintenance of these foreign technologies and military values, as well as their impact on the New Kingdom Egyptian military and conceptions of kingship.
The last pharaohs: the Egyptian reception of late Roman emperors
F. Carlà-Uhink, Ch. Rollinger (eds), The Tetrarchy as ideology: reconfigurations and representations of an imperial power (Heidelberger althistorische Beiträge und epigraphische Studien, Bd. 64), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, pp. 221-246 , 2023
This article deals with hieroglyphic inscriptions dated between Diocletian and Constantius II with the aim to shed light on the reception of the emperors and the final stage of Egyptian kingship. The analysis focusses on three funerary stelae of the sacred animals from Hermonthis since, as it is demonstrated, two blocks from Tahta usually ascribed to Maximinus Daia date in fact to Commodus. It is proved that all four emperors of the imperial college are mentioned in the Tetrarchic stela. It is also argued that the author of the text modelled the dating formula after the format occurring in Greek documents in order to fit the rulers in, and borrowed the title pr-aA.w nty xw (‘the kings who are revered’), otherwise attested only in demotic, as to convey their equal status as pharaohs. Finally, it is demonstrated how the two remaining stelae attest to the adaptation of their texts to the changing dating systems used by the local administrations rather than being documents of an alleged pagan reaction to the Christian emperors.
Going Through Changes: The Elite Perception of the King in Sixth Dynasty Egypt
2019
The Sixth Dynasty of Egypt (c. 2305-2152BCE) was a period plagued with royal problems. While Teti apparently suffered an attack on his life at the hands of his “bodyguards”, Pepy I became the victim of an unsuccessful harem conspiracy, and Pepy II seemingly lost control over the number and power of his officials. The breakdown of the Egyptian state after this turbulent time resulted in scholars attributing this collapse almost exclusively to the instability of the government. However, the research conducted so far has focused mainly on the role played by the king’s growing administration, while largely ignoring the position of the king himself. This thesis seeks to establish how officials perceived their king during the Sixth Dynasty, and whether, given the instability of the monarchy, there was a marked decline in support for the king during this time. To understand this, elite Sixth Dynasty tomb inscriptions from the capital and selected provinces will be analysed and compared to determine if their respect and appreciation for the king changed during the rule of each monarch. The aim of this research is therefore to detect any decline in the pride these officials had in their closeness to the king, and to examine the possible implications on the Old Kingdom.
Religions, 2023
Scholars have understood the anonymity of the Egyptian kings in Exodus in various ways. Some argue that the Israelite author intentionally anonymized the foreign kings for possible rhetorical effects. Others believe that the anonymity was a simple case of inadvertent forgetting. Although these approaches have merit in contributing to a more robust understanding of the anonymity of Pharaohs, a different approach may also have something to offer in grasping a fuller understanding of the absence of the Pharaonic names. In this regard, this article seeks to examine the anonymity in conversation with the Egyptian practice of damnatio memoriae (i.e., damnation of memory). According to this method, the proto-Israelite transmitters of the Exodus traditions deliberately obliterated the names of the Egyptian kings for the purpose of terminating their existence and memory from the proto-Israelite community.
This thesis examines the representation of each king in three key texts from the Kushite Twenty-Fifth Dynasty of Egypt. The depiction of the king upon public monuments was an essential feature of the propaganda of kingship throughout ancient Egyptian history. However, the recognition of why and how representations of the king were considered propagandistic has been somewhat neglected. This paper analyses the “Triumphal Stela” of Piye (representing the beginning of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty), Stela Kawa IV of Taharqa (illustrating the mid-point of this Kushite rule), and the “Dream Stela” of Tanutamani (delineating the end of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty). Many scholars have analysed these stelae, and their historical and socio-political frameworks. However, this thesis examines how elements of language within these documents (including iconography and rhetoric) functioned as royal propaganda in response to their historical contexts. This complements previous studies by analysing fundamental aspects of how and why these stelae are considered propagandistic.
The presence of foreigners in Egypt lasted throughout the entire Pharaonic era. It had different features depending on epochs and increased during the New Kingdom, because of forced installations of great amounts of prisoners of war. In the Pharaonic ideology, foreigners represented the Nine Bows against which the Egyptians fought to maintain the order of the Maat, the cosmic order – a mission that the deity attributed to the Pharaoh. But sources show a stark difference in the ways in which Egyptians described the foreigner outside of Egypt and the foreigner within Egypt. Referring to the A. Loprieno’s theory of topos and mimesis, I will use the forced installation of prisoners of war as a case study to investigate the Egyptian consideration of foreigners living and working in Egypt and the reflections of this vision in written and visual sources. Some official sources, created for propaganda purposes, underline the importance of a rapid "egyptization" of these people, obtained by forcing them to abandon their language and learn Egyptian, a necessary and irreversible process. But beyond the propagandistic proclamations, what information on the presence of foreigners in Egypt do these sources provide? In my paper I will present some examples concerning the treatment of prisoners of war, to underline possible elements of what Egyptians considers “otherness” and how it was possible to eliminate or almost reduce the distance between them and the outsiders.
rznn Tnn Cranruowr Gnaoua:rr Scuoor After general remarks on popularization, this review article considers three books written by Egyptologists for the non-specialist: Lalouette's Textes sacris et textes profones, James's Pharqoh's People, and Redford's Akhenaten. Lalouette's anthology exemplifies the traditional philological approach, providing access to a culture through texts; this highly competent book emphasizes literary and monumental writings and shows a "royalist" slant. James draws masterfully on a broader range of material-including documentary texts, representations and material culture-to provide an integrated cultural portrait highlighting the non-royal population of the New Kingdom; he explains the nature and limitations of the written sources. The reviewer notes recent work which draws upon the social sciences to help reconstruct ancient cultures. Redford shows us the historian and interpreter in action, discussing Akhenaten's reign in its historical and international context, the important East Karnak material, and the character of Akhenaten and his reforms. Some issues, e.g., the coregency, are not fully debated. The characterization of Akhenaten and his program is so negative and pointed as to suggest a "hidden agenda" of modern political commentary, though the reviewer iargely concurs with the assessment. A brief conclusion notes the importance of such books and the awareness they can promote among the public.