Reflection

Despite a professed love of word, the philological focus has been on detail rather than holistic picture. Philologists have left intact a received picture of ancient Egypt, by their unreflective use of generalized concepts and categories such as society, economy, and religion. For describing any other society, particularly outside the European frame, our vocabulary for cultural and material practices may be inappropriate. Even our most general categories turn out to be unexpectedly recent: Timothy Mitchell has charted the extraordinarily late (mid-twentieth-century) development of the contemporary meaning of economy in European-language use (Mitchell 2002). General terms for dimensions such as economic, political, religious, and social may be useful filters for sifting and analyzing evidence. Yet they continually merge and overlap in practice, and the way we use each term in the set must affect our understanding of each of the others and of the whole set. Our approach will differ according to whether we adopt society or culture or ethnic group as the label for the totality, however porous and impermanent we consider it. If we do not define our terms, or reconsider our categories, we are likely simply to reproduce the dominant ideas of our place and time. This problem, raised by Marxist historians (de Ste Croix 1989), should be of concern to all interested in studying any society, because those dominant ideas may not apply automatically to our particular field of study.

An ancient Egyptian definition of religion? The composition the King as priest of the Sun

For the dimension of religion, over the past fifty years, Jan Assmann has worked most prolifically to define our terms explicitly in a West German theological and literary frame. From eight sources connected with kingship and its writings, Assmann reconstructed a remarkable ancient Egyptian written composition, with no ancient title, called by him The King as Priest of the Sun. One key passage states why the creator sun-god Ra installed the nswt, “king,” on earth (Assmann 2001, 3-6):

The Sun-god installed the king on the earth of the living, for ever and eternity, to judge between people and to satisfy the gods, to create what is Right, to annihilate what is Evil, giving offerings to the gods, voice-offerings to the blessed dead.

Assmann interprets the first two lines as a broad definition of religion, as ethics and justice: the king must make possible ma'at, “what is right,” the just and ethical behavior among humans, underpinned by law, to judge between people. The next two lines would then respond to a narrow definition of religion as ritual: the king must ensure that offerings were made to satisfy deities and the blessed dead. By using this source to illustrate his broad and narrow definitions of religion, Assmann anchors the Egyptological argument firmly in ancient writing.

The power of the research by Assmann comes not least from his unsurpassed knowledge of the written sources and sensitivity to their architectural and historical context. Yet here, the limitations of the definition from writing can also be seen, both in the restricted circle of sources for this ancient articulation and in the openness of writing to different analysis. In other ancient Egyptian written sources, particularly the literary genre of Teachings, the concept of just and ethical behavior, includes care for the deities, and the dead (see Chapter 5). Therefore, the division between ethics and cult, central to religious movements such as Reformation Christianity, may not apply in any clear-cut fashion to that ancient Egyptian definition of kingship. In another evident limitation, the Teachings describe ethical precepts as given by father to son: even within a conceptual frame of the nuclear family, they leave unanswered how a father might have advised a daughter and a mother a son or daughter and how sisters and brothers spoke. Feminism and gender studies introduce fresh questions and prospects for research.

Accordingly, in place of a theological focus on the most developed expressions of religious thought, Fitzenreiter prefers an anthropological focus in order to consider more broadly religious practice, as social activity, out of which religion might emerge as a collective longer-term presence, as religious institutions. This approach allows him to suspend certain Eurocentric assumptions, such as the centrality of a written tradition, or the monotheism versus polytheism debate (as in Hornung 1996), extensively discussed in Egyptology, with reference both to the definition of the word netjer (used in Christian writing in its Coptic form noute as the translation for Greek theos, “God”) and to the dozen years when King Akhenaten focussed worship and offerings exclusively on one deity. According to Fitzenreiter, a shift away from word focus to practice allows greater attention to recurrent and prominent phenomena marginalized in previous histories of Egyptian religion, such as ancestor cult and divination, oracles, and the phenomena studied under the heading of animal cults.

Using written sources in context

Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and disciplinary isolation are not overturned in one step, and the challenge from Fitzenreiter cannot be met until more studies of broader ranges of sources have been undertaken, from archaeological survey and fieldwork and from new material cultural studies. If the focus on written sources seems set to continue, research can at least be set on the most productive footing possible, following Assmann to seek greatest possible awareness of partiality and context. In one of the main disciplinary divisions, of archaeology from history, a misreading on either side has tended to reinforce mutually a lack of trust and interest between those studying pasts. History may tend to privilege written above material context, without discussion, while archaeology may eject all written sources as elite, without defining elite (a problem in sociology also, see Scott 2008, 27).

In place of this standoff, a material primacy could be acknowledged, within which writing provides one more indirect approach to peoples in the past, one with the power of human speech (Morris 2000). All writings may be biased to a particular view, but archaeology can help in identifying and analyzing bias, because it offers a context for each manuscript and inscription. Regularly, this context is not direct or primary, as most written material survives only in second, third, or fourth hand places of deposition or inscription. Still, even secondary or tertiary context, precisely observed, allows modern readers to assess the social location of words, much as an anthropologist in direct observation has an opportunity to assess the social location of their participant in conversation.

In the end, the danger with writing bias lies in our usage: we fail too often to observe precise social context, and we exclude other evidence, as if written and spoken words provide a direct guide to the society of the speaker. Implicitly, we assume a society free of contradictions and complexities, one which we could simply read in words. Yet, if we omit the written evidence, we might still impose modern categories and thinking on the past. Beyond any message or communication, the enormous potential of ancient writings is in their linguistic content: they give words to the world in a language that is not the language of the modern writer and reader. The words may prove to be from an elite, but even where the linguistic evidence can be made so simple, the vocabulary is not directly that of a twenty-first-century global elite that writes and reads studies of the past. As long as we treat writings as just a subset in the range of evidence, their vocabulary and syntax can help to create a different, less Eurocentric introduction to their society.

Language and politics

In both written and spoken forms, language can act as a medium for expressing or effecting change or continuity in a society. According to one understanding of language, words do not merely label phenomena in a fixed reality, but rather they are one of the means by which humans model and construct social life. In social and historical context, there are collective forces around individual speakers. For appreciating and analyzing those forces in words, we might adopt from the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin the concepts of unified language/centralizing monoglossia as against different dialects/centrifugal heteroglossia (Hirschkop 1999). There is a danger that our interpretation might become one-dimensional, pitting heteroglossia as heroic resistance against monoglossia as the epic voice of a tyrant. Against this, the complementary linguistics of the Italian political writer Antonio Gramsci can keep open to historical enquiry the precise measure and impact of monoglossia and heteroglossia in each context (Ives 2004).

The two extremes of the European twentieth century underpin these two writers. In russia, Bakhtin had to live through the lethal effects of a unified official vocabulary and speech during the Stalin years of terror before and after the World War II, including mock trials, mass-scale executions, and mass sentencing to labor camps. For Bakhtin, the singular sober voice (monoglossia) carried a literal death sentence, even if, unlike his communist cowriters and friends Valentin Voloshinov and piotr Medvedev, he survived horrendous hardship to teach in university in the Soviet Union. Conversely, Gramsci saw disunity in speech as a fundamental reason for the fragmented resistance that allowed Mussolini to take power in 1920s Italy, leading to an alliance with 1930s Germany under Hitler. Broken by ten years in Fascist prison, Gramsci did not live to witness the Nazi concentration camps, but his prison notebooks, smuggled to Moscow after his death, preserve his incomplete explorations of the problems of language in human society. Gramsci studied linguistics at university, and his insights may encourage those in archaeology working on even the more elite written sources from part-literate societies.

According to the linguistic school in which Gramsci was trained, all speech contains evidence of contradictory workings, allowing us to see how some social expression acquires the force of prestige, almost forcing others to model their own expression on that of the center. Gramsci recognized how those dominating a society are best placed to express their place in the world and to apply its expression to maintaining that place. By contrast, only a fraction of resources for articulating and sharing beyond local horizons would be available to those whose lives are dominated by manual labor. To describe and analyze the more fragmented reflections among manual laborers, Gramsci subversively used the label folklore (Crehan 2002). These concepts of unifying versus fragmented, and of prestige in expression, may be productive for Egyptologists. They can help to account for changes over time in the ancient Egyptian written evidence, as well as giving a framework for assessing the social position of any particular verbal expression from the past. The social understanding of language provides crucial justification for including written sources prominently within the archaeological study of the past.

Applying critical theory to Egyptology

With the conceptual tools of mono-/heteroglossia and prestige, from Bakhtin and Gramsci, the written evidence can remain an essential part of the range of evidence for the particular society/societies in ancient Egypt, provided that it is decentered from its status as core. The subject of study ancient Egypt might still be defined as the area of the language community ancient Egyptian speakers, if only as a provisional device to commence study. From the introduction of the hieroglyphic script around 3100 bc to the start of Achaemenid Iranian rule in 525 bc, ancient Egyptian is the main language attested in the area from First Cataract to Mediterranean. Accordingly, dominant script and language have formed together one of the criteria for defining my time-space focus as that time span and area. The geographical limit is reinforced by the fusion of the hieroglyphic script with ancient Egyptian art, a specific manner of figurative expression. The far larger scope of material culture without writing or depiction further broadly confirms the language area: the same archaeological map emerges from study of the major production industries, pottery and textiles.

In time, the boundary might be drawn later or earlier: during the early first millennium, material culture shifts with the introduction of iron production, and in the opposite direction, the script art fusion remains strong as late as the second-third centuries AD, when some of the best-preserved ancient Egyptian temples were built and some of the most informative ancient Egyptian temple manuscripts were copied. Against these earlier or later alternatives, the major justification for 525 BC as an end point is the change in script/language use. As a unitary and integral social field, ancient Egyptian religion ends at the point when the Achaemenid court and administration introduce into the Nile Valley a government using Aramaic script and language, and Zoroastrian beliefs. Even if the new script/lan-guage/beliefs exist alongside the ancient Egyptian and even if such coexistence finds New Kingdom antecedents, a new long-term history begins at this point. Coincidentally, or perhaps from the first formal observation, Johann Joachim Winckelmann had inferred the same break in his massively influential 1764 history of ancient art, where he proposed just two periods of ancient Egyptian visual production, pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid, to Roman.

As ancient writing is my own research focus within the evidence spectrum, doubtless, it remains too central throughout this volume. This introduction is intended to keep the reader fully aware of the bias. Alongside visual arts and architecture, the range of material culture and the less tangible yield of modern extensive archaeological fieldwork remain to be explored. Only a joint staff could muster expertise to cover all the possible domains, and a full history of religious practice would need new multidisciplinary research. Within these constraints, a philologist introduces the terrain, noting separate and joint limitations and potential of each in its range of source types. In the distance, the impossible ideal of a total history remains a powerful frame of interpretation and motivation. In a society, those with greatest economic resources may be directing the material form and content of production, as well as the ideas that influence all parts of the society. Research can target these dominant structures and their impact and assess the scope for filling some of the gaps in our knowledge, for example, the religious practices of fragmented dominated groups, including the bulk of the population in ancient agriculture and animal husbandry, or groups less visible in written and visual source material, by their age, gender, type of work, or ethnicity.

Future

Writing after the January 25, 2011 revolution, new directions may emerge in the study of the past within Egypt, and Arabic may rejoin European languages as a leading research medium. However much we hope for this, much needs to be learned from the lack of change in exactly this area after the 1952 revolution, despite the pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism promoted by Gamal Abdel Nasser into the 1960s (Hassan 2007). The early twenty-first century is being seen as shifting the global centers to South and East Asia; the implications of this for Eurocentric academic studies, including anthropology and archaeology, remain uncertain. A shift in centers of prestige could create new scope for nonEuropean studies, including here Arabic studies of Egyptian evidence, whether or not divided into the same time blocks as now. On the other hand, Eurocentrism may be replaced not by Egyptocentric or Afrocentric study, but by absence of study and thought, amounting to a gap in being human, a failing that is denounced in Islam by the Arabic word jahaliya, “ignorance.” The better future lies in the hands not of established Egyptologists but of a new generation of thinkers particularly in Africa, including Egyptian Egyptologists and extending broadly across reflective and creative worlds.