[MUSIC PLAYING] ANN BRAUDE: Welcome to
today's Women's Studies and Religion work in
progress presentation on the new research that is
coming out of our program. And we're so
thrilled today to be hearing about the
work in progress from Professor Mariam Ayad. And I'm going to introduce
Mariam and her interlocutor, Jacquelyn Williamson,
very briefly today. And then Mariam will make
a PowerPoint presentation introducing her
research, and then we'll have a chance to have these
two experts in Egyptology and Feminist Studies
discussing the data that Mariam has presented. Thank you all for joining us. It looks like a wonderful
international audience on our Zoom today. And so we greet you wherever
you are coming on from. And I do want to reassure you
that as we reopen and head back for in-person
events next fall, that we endeavor to keep
our international audience connected to our events. And we hope to find
ways that we'll be able to continue
to keep you connected. So let me introduce
Professor Mariam Ayad. Do you want to come
on the video, Mariam? Mariam did her doctorate
at Brown University, here in the United States. Greetings, Mariam. And she then taught in
the art history department at the University of Memphis
for 10 years, where she became an associate professor. She then made a very
interesting decision to return to Egypt to bring
attention to Women's Studies in the study of ancient Egypt,
on the ground, in Egypt. And she has had a very
distinguished career there, as well as in the United
States, with more than a dozen refereed articles
in print, as well as her monograph on God's wife. She has also
distinguished herself as an intellectual
leader, convening six international
conferences in her field. And the most recent
of those is the one that really drew the attention
of the Harvard faculty, when we invited her to come here
as a Women's Studies research associate. And that was the very first
international conference on women in ancient
Egypt, which she convened at the
American University in Cairo, where she teaches. Another one of the participants
in that conference was another past research associate-- well,
a past research associate-- Mariam is still current with us. And that is
Jacquelyn Williamson. We're so pleased to welcome
Jackie back to the WSRP. And what we are
going to do today is to invite you into
the process of what we do in the Women's Studies
and Religion Program, where what's really
thrilling about the program is that scholars discuss
each other's work in progress while the research is going on. And so they have input into
the intellectual process of developing the development
of the new research ideas. And so what you're
going to see today is the only two
Egyptologists who have been in the Women's
Studies and Religion Program, discussing
this new work and bringing the lens
of Women's Studies, which is very rarely applied in
a field that is so data driven, where the primary work of the
field is to uncover the data. And the ability to apply
a theoretical lens, like the lens of gender,
to that data is very-- there's very rarely
the opportunity for what you're
going to see today, which is two of the premier
scholars in the field thinking about how to do that. So without further
ado, I am going to give the podium to Mariam. One suggestion I have for you is
that while Mariam is speaking, you use the Speaker
View for your Zoom view. And then when she has
concluded her PowerPoint and we move to the
panel discussion, that you move from a
Speaker View to the-- MARIAM AYAD: Gallery. ANN BRAUDE: I forget
what it's called, but you know what
I mean, where you see everybody on the screen. And you'll see
all of us present, so you can hear the discussion. So Mariam, the floor is yours. MARIAM AYAD: Hi, Ann. Hi, everybody. Thank you for giving
me the opportunity to present my work in progress. And I see in the chat
that a lot of friends from Cairo and in the
field have joined in. So this was a rather
tricky presentation to put together, because I knew
I would have a mixed audience. So the questions are
there for you to ask. I will also have a slide up
at the end, with my email. If you have any
follow up questions, feel free to email me directly. OK, so the title
that you see here is actually my research project. I'm trying to look,
this year, at whether we can reach a gender understanding
of how the Egyptians composed and perceived of their
funerary manuscripts. And as a first step
toward doing that is trying to define issues
of agency, individuality, and choice. If they did, indeed,
adopt gender pathways to the afterlife, and
it is still a very big if, then who got
to do the choosing? Is it the artist? The tomb owner? These are questions that Jackie
and I will discuss at the end. But perhaps the most iconic
image of ancient Egypt is the Great Pyramids,
perceived as giant tombs, although the ancient Egyptians
themselves may have conceived of them as stairways
to the heaven, as we find out from the pyramid
texts from a few dynasties later, the sixth dynasty. And in terms of finding
gender in funerary art, we have a lot of women, usually
represented as mourners, as we see here
and here, or here, where one female mourner
is looking on at the ritual slaughter of an ox, which is
an integral part of the Opening of the Mouth Ritual. We often also find
women associated with the male official
in his funerary text, as we see here in
the Papyrus of Ani. We have many females
that are represented in tombs of their husbands, of
their fathers, of their sons, and that's not really what
I am looking for this year. What I am interested in is those
women, queens, elite women, who could afford a good
burial, [INAUDIBLE] actually [INAUDIBLE]
texts that aided them to reach the afterlife. So the Great Pyramids
of Giza are well known, but they are not inscribed. Although we do have
queens that were buried in smaller pyramids at Giza. It's not until we get
to the sixth dynasty, in Saqqara, where queens start
to have their own pyramid texts and their own
pathway to the afterlife. Very fast forward to the end
of the 19th dynasty, where we find that some of the best
funerary assemblages in museums today, at the British
Museum and the Louvre, belong to women who were not
royal, as far as we can tell, who often have the title of
Chantress to the god Amun-Re, in the temple. So these are elite
women, and yeah, they could afford a
funerary set that's composed of numerous
sarcophagi, as we see here, for the Henutmehyt
collection, some of which would be partially
or fully gold gilded. So a layer-- a very thin layer,
of gold applied to the wood underneath. And then the wood itself,
and even the gold, would be inscribed with
texts that would presumably help her achieve an afterlife. And this is the other
magnificent example, from the Louvre. Again, [INAUDIBLE]. And you have to wonder,
how could they afford this? We do have a very good
book out, The Cost of Death by Kara Cooney, in
which she actually tried to put in perspective how
much these magnificent objects cost. So these women had
multiple coffins, each with its own
sets of inscriptions. And by the time we get
to the 21st dynasty, we find a preponderance
of manuscripts of the Book of the
Dead, where the women are the main protagonists
or the main worshipper. And, [? Aniq, ?] I
know you're here. So I'm happy that
you're here, because I'm going to refer to your work,
about how these women often chose specific titles
to identify them in these manuscripts. And [? Aniq ?]
has just submitted a very good paper for the-- coming out of the conference
that Ann mentioned that looks at how
these women presented in these funerary documents
from the 21st dynasty. So they're magnificent pieces. They're really
nicely illustrated, but they also show
considerable variation. So you can just say that
all women have the same set of spells in the
Book of the Dead, just like you cannot say that
all men have the same spells. Although there's a
corpus to choose from, often, individuals
would pick and choose. And there's been some work
on this process of production of the funerary texts, whether
they were mass produced with the name left vacant for
someone to buy a manuscript and put their name in, or
whether they were custom made. And we're not going to get
into that debate today, but this is something that's
been discussed in my field. One of the really
nice manuscripts published by Rita Lucarelli, The
Book of the Dead of Gatseshen, who was also a
chantress in the temple. But what's interesting
about her documents is that she usurped
an earlier document and superimposed her titles in
[? heiratic, ?] in the vignette there. So again, the idea of
reuse, how would that impact her perception
of the afterlife and how she needed to get
there, is a big question. As I said, these
manuscripts show variation. And I've included a few
slides here to show you just how these variations manifest. So here, the funerary
papyrus of Maatkare, she's represented twice. In both cases, she's wearing
the vulture headdress, a queen insignia, even though we're
not quite sure whether she was [AUDIO OUT] or not. And she's shown seated
at the offering table, and then her life-size mummy
is shown behind her as well. And that's the
bigger composition, to give you an idea of
what she was looking at. Note the Leopard skin
clad priest right there. He's performing a summary of
the Opening of the Mouth Ritual by burning incense and
pouring [INAUDIBLE] water before her offering table. Another Chantress
of Amun, Lady Tiye, whose manuscript is now in
the Metropolitan Museum. Again, has a very interesting
collection of spells. In fact, she has two
manuscripts, a Book of the Dead and the Book of the Amduat. And both were rolled up
and placed in the same box and discovered together. You can see from the
accession numbers that they were cataloged
at the same time as well. So here we see her worshipping
the god Amun-- the god Osiris, excuse me, who
is seated on his throne, wearing the white
crown, the Atef crown and holding the
crook and the flail. And then we get
to a point where, again, in the 21st
dynasty, a woman could take an element
of the king's coronation and place it in her
funerary documents, like we here see in the
papyrus of Heriweben. So this idea of purification
by the goddess-- by the gods Horus
and Thoth is often associated with
coronation scenes and has been labeled by Gardiner
as the "baptism of pharaoh," again, using terms from
a different culture to the concept in Egyptian
that may not quite be the same. But basically, it's
[INAUDIBLE] water that's being poured over her head. And if you notice, instead
of a squiggly line for water, what she has is signs
for life, the Ankh, and for dominion, the Was. So they're showering her
with life and dominion. One of my former
professors, Leonard Lesko, published an article in
'94, in which he compared two Book of the Dead manuscripts
belonging to two priests who have the same name,
Pinedjem I and Pinedjem II, one in the Cairo museum and the
other in the British Museum. And in his paper, he argued
that even though they were a grandfather
and grandson, they had different religious
beliefs according to their funerary documents,
whereas one was [? solar ?] and the other was more Osirian. Now we do have a
manuscript that belongs to the daughter of
Pinedjem II, and I wonder whether we should
not look at her manuscript through that lens as well. What kind of religious
beliefs did she have? Did she adhered to her father's,
to her great grandfathers, or did she come up with her own? As far as I know, I'm not aware
of any studies on her text. Now, we come, fast
forward, to my area of speciality, the 25th
Dynasty, the Nubian dynasty. And when the Nubians
came through Egypt, they did so under the
pretext of restoring order to a much fragmented country. As you can see from
the slides here, the arrow shows the
[INAUDIBLE] march by the Nubians under the
leadership of Piankhi, or Piye, as they attempted to
conquer Egypt and succeeded. So under their rule,
they utilized an office known from the preceding
dynasty and even earlier, from the 18th dynasty, known
as the God's Wife of Amun. And they gave that
position to Piye's sister, Aminerdis, whose
alabaster statue you see here on the screen. It's currently in Cairo. And Amenirdis had a
very interesting chapel built in the vicinity of the
funerary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. You see here the [INAUDIBLE]
facade of her chapel. The chapel was probably
built by her successor in office, Shepenwepet
II, the daughter of Piye, who is essentially her niece. And we know that because
in fact, Shepenwepet is represented in
the court, laying the foundation of that
temple in association with the goddess
Seshat, or Sefkhet-Abwy. You can see here the two
figures holding poles as if they're fishing
rods, but actually it's a ritual called the
Stretching of the Cord. And the ritual summed
up the entire process of building a temple. And we see also
Shepenwepet performing all the funerary rights
in that chapel for, here, the Osirian triad, but
also for Amenirdis, who replaces Isis as the
third member of the triad. So she replaces the feminine
component of the divine triad. Why would Shepenwepet do that? Possibly because she saw
the demolition of an earlier chapel belonging to another
God's Wife in antiquity, that of Shepenwepet
I. So she decided to build this
monument for eternity, in stone, for her
predecessor and her mother. And we do indeed have that
inscription, that dedication, on the jambs leading into the
doorway to the chapel itself, where she declares that
it's Shepenwepet who built this monument for
eternity for her predecessor, for her mother-- adoptive mother and
aunt, Amenirdis I. Now, the design of
the chapel is unique. I published a paper
examining where they may have gotten the
idea of placing two shrines, called tent shrines, a
very old architectural form that dates back to
the Third Dynasty. Just to give you a
perspective on the time lapse, that's about over 2000
years, 2,200 years between when that form
was developed and seen first in the Saqqara
Complex of Djoser and when it was used here again. So when the two shrines are
placed one inside the other, each is roofed. A corridor is created
between the two structures. You can see the yellow
arrows, and that's where all the interesting
stuff is inscribed. And we know this
is funerary texts, probably selected
by Shepenwepet-- but that's a discussion
for me and Jackie later-- decided to inscribe
her chapel with texts. The Pyramid Texts,
borrowed very heavily from those queen's
pyramids from Saqqara, from 2,500 years earlier. She also decided
on solar hymns that are part of the Book of
the Dead, chapter 15. And she included one of the
most extensive selections of the Opening the Mouth
Ritual on the upper register of all four walls. And the text are color
coded here, on the plan. So the Opening of the
Mouth is in green, surrounding all the four
walls of the corridor. The pyramid texts are in
orange, and the solar hymns are in yellow. Just to give you an idea
of the layout of the texts. For the longest
time, the only images that were available
to us were those taken by [INAUDIBLE] in the 1930s. And they still remain
the best in terms of the technology used, because
this corridor is very narrow. It's no more than maybe
90 centimeters in width, and the walls are very
high, about 4 meters. Sometimes, it's very hard
to get an entire section of the wall in one photograph. The hieroglyphs are too
big for a regular camera, and there's no space [AUDIO OUT]
into five columns, inscribed under a vignette. Sometimes, the texts complement
what the vignette shows. Other times, they reiterate
what is literally depicted. So traditionally, you know, each
vignette with associated text is given a number. Egyptologists are
fond of numbers, so altogether, 75 have been
identified in her chapel. So these scenes vary in content. They may include offerings
of incense, as we see here, or the ritual slaughter,
as we saw earlier in the presentation. My work on the Opening
of the Mouth of Amenirdis points to a directional
greeting that allows the priests to
walk into the chapel as they read the
texts, thereby bringing about the animation of
her mummy or statue. The texts are read
in retrograde, which means you don't
read into the hieroglyphs, you read into the
backs of their heads, which is typical of Opening
of the Mouth texts anyway. And I've also published
elsewhere the fact that the texts on either
side of a virtual central axis near each other, they
share the direction of reading, and exhibit thematic continuity
along each side of the chapel. So the priests walk
in, they perform that, and once they achieve
the Opening of her Mouth, Amenirdis is finally shown
animated for the first time, extending a hand to an
offering table placed before her as some
priest consecrated the offerings for her. And then she descends
to the lower register, where she starts her
journey out of the chapel by an act of worship. He or she is shown
presenting incense to two different forms
of the solar god; Ra-Horakhty on the east, because
he is the god of the rising sun; and Ra-Atum on
the west, because he's the god of the setting sun. As she then proceeds to
read the pyramid texts that are inscribed on the
lower register in the order in which they are encountered. Her spirit is doing the
reading so that eventually, the texts, the pyramid
texts, lead her toward the northern sky,
where she would become one of the imperishable stars. So that's an older imagination
or an idea, an old idea, of the afterlife. The imperishable stars
or the circumpolar stars, they never set. So by joining them
in the North sky, she becomes
imperishable herself. Now, Amenirdis was a
God's Wife of Amun, she had a very vast estate
and she did not supervise that estate for herself. Instead, she had a vast staff. The cemetery with a lot
of other [INAUDIBLE] and plenty of dynasty
tombs, most of which belonging to officials
associated with the God's Wife. But not only a central
location in the Necropolis. And this part of the
Necropolis suggests that it may be one of the
earliest constructed there. It's also a time when
all these monuments, they're underground
monuments, but they are called, in German
[GERMAN] because they are as big as a palace,
and yet they are funerary. So in the Tomb of Harwa,
he also had pyramid texts. He also had solar
hymns, and he also had Opening of the
Mouth Ritual scenes, but his selection is drastically
different from Amenirdis' in terms of selection,
in terms of layout. My work there has
focused on the text of the second
pillared hall, where he has a very vast,
extensive selection of the Opening of the Mouth
scenes, shown here in-- Yeah. So essentially, what
I proceeded to do is after I did find
the Texts of Harwa, I proceeded to color code them
and compare them to Amenirdis in terms of layout, because
I'm a very visual person. And for example, spells
that have to do with water or cool water or incense
are shaded in blue, in both monuments. And that kind of helped me see
how the layout is different. You may notice that
with the plan of Harwa, there's two lines of
two different colors because his texts are
both on the upper register and the lower register. So it's a very busy wall. The texts are very
clearly different. Their selections from
the pyramid texts are hugely different. His is most similar to what you
find in the [? Hatshepsut ?] southern [INAUDIBLE]
mainly in the 200 range for my Egyptologist
friends who are listening. Whereas Amenirdis is from
the 400s to the 600s. And also, she has a much
more concise selection. So she only has eight spells in
which she's resurrected, given food, and incense, and
everything that she needs to survive in the afterlife. His selection is very extensive. The same kind of
difference we also see in the selections of
the Opening of the Mouth. Whereas hers are
very neatly laid out, it's very easy to make a
case for [INAUDIBLE] reading and thematic continuity along
the walls, his is more complex. I don't want to say jumbled. But they're very different. So they select things
from the same genres, but the selections
themselves are different, and the way they're used in
each monument is very different. Also some elements in
her chapel are summarized iconographically, but are
stated in great detail in his monuments. And sometimes,
concision is good, more is not always better. So my project this year
is to take a step back. I know how the
texts are different. The question now is,
why are they different? And I would like to
invite Jackie to join me as we ponder these questions. Why are these two individuals
adopting different pathways to the afterlife? Is the difference gendered, or
is it a class-based difference? Quack, in '05, published a paper
which he suggested the Opening of the Mouth just is the
random collection of prayers as the pretext for each deceased
to include whatever they wanted or cared about. I'm not quite sure I'm sold on
that idea, but it's out there. And then that raises
the question also of who made the selection? Is it the College of Cardinals? Priests? The artists? A combination of both? The tomb owner? How can we know? And that leads to questions
of agency and individuality. And I think I need
to stop sharing now so that Jackie can join us. ANN BRAUDE: Thank
you so much, Mariam. I'm going to interject
for just a minute to give both you and Jackie
a chance to get on screen, and to give our audience
a chance to switch over to the gallery views so that
they can see both of you for our conversation. And so it's really my
enormous pleasure right now to introduce Professor
Jacquelyn Williamson, who is an associate professor
of Art and Archaeology, focusing on ancient Egypt,
at George Mason University. She is a past research
associate, as I mentioned, and she is well
known as an expert on the Amarna Period of art. And we know her for her
wonderful manuscript on her 2016 book on
Nefertiti's sun temple, which we had the chance to see it
progress while she was here at WSRP. And it's just one of her
many, many publications on Amarna and ancient Egypt. So it's such a pleasure
to ask the two of you now to let us in on
your conversation. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
Thanks so much, Ann. And it's just so
exciting to be back, and I'm so thrilled
to see so many of our friends and colleagues
in our participant area. And hi, everyone. And so, again, Mariam's work is
so exciting and so interesting. And it does, it brings up
these big picture questions, I think, that very
often we, in Egyptology, shy away from a little
bit due to the fact that we don't have
that time machine. We can't go back in time. We can't interview these people
and say, what's going on here? We're a little bit reluctant
to go into questions of why and identity
and stuff like that, because we feel like we
don't have the smoking gun. This is something that
Egyptology is always looking for. What's the smoking gun? How can we prove it without
the shadow of a doubt? And I think that, again, we're
a very positivist field, which, in many ways, is a good thing. And in many ways,
it's a bad thing. And so one of the opportunities,
I think, that WSRP really gives for people
like Mariam and I is that we are asking these
other kinds of questions, and it gives us an opportunity
to bounce ideas off of people who are
not Egyptologists, who have a totally
different perspective. And it was one of the most
growing and surprising years for me. And I'm so grateful
for it, and I know that I grew so much as scholar. And Miriam and I have had many
conversations, over the years, exactly on these
sorts of topics. So this gives us a
great opportunity to really be able to pull in the
brain trust of other scholars that Egyptology is very
often unwilling to talk to, for a variety of reasons. Some of it's logical. Our field is really, really,
really far in the past. And we have to be conversant
with almost 3,000 years of culture, history,
religion, et cetera. MARIAM AYAD: Language. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
And language, exactly. Everybody loves a
good dead language. If you're an Egyptologist,
you love a dead language. But one of the
problems, of course, that brings us that
much of modern theory predicates upon a modern
Judeo-Christian sort of basis that, again, is based on the
ideas of the Enlightenment, et cetera. And these are concepts that
are just simply not applicable. And so very often to use theory
productively and successfully, you have to
dismantle that theory and figure out what can we
keep and what can we throw out? And that's hard to do. And theory is not
a plug and play. You can't just take it
like a math equation and stick it in and expect
for results to come out. And so I think that one
of the things that Mariam is doing very successfully is
combining both the data driven concepts and ideas of our
field and trying to combine it with these other bigger
picture questions and trying to ask if this data,
then what can we take from it? And it's very exciting, I think. So that's just my
little five-second sort of blathering away. But yeah, it's very
exciting though, I do think. And so Mariam, what are
your thoughts about where-- one of the things that we
wanted to talk about, I think, is this idea of is
this difference that we see in these manifestations
of the pyramid text, are they indeed gendered? And what do we mean by that? Do we mean gendered
as in gendered according to the person
who selected the text, or do we mean gendered
in terms of the idea of-- sometimes we get this
idea of "the Osiris." You know, after you die,
you become the Osiris. Women can become the Osiris. And Osiris is a man,
but yet sometimes is gendered as female. So in and of itself,
it's this very squishy-- and this is something
that Egyptian religion does that I think moderns hate. Ancient Egyptian
religion is squishy. It doesn't have these
hard and fast divisions. So yeah. MARIAM AYAD: Yeah. Well, you know, Heather McCarthy
has done some wonderful work on the tombs of
Tawosret and Nefertari, where it's very clear
that those queens have to bend their gender in order
to achieve an afterlife. They had to become an Osiris. And I think, if
I'm not mistaken, they had amulets in the
shape of penises attached so they become fully male. Now, that's what
was so intriguing about the Text of
Amenirdis, is that she avoids those [INAUDIBLE] that
forced her to alter her gender. Her texts are fully feminized,
grammatically speaking. We joked a bit about
the parts as well, and why not bring it up? So here it comes,
everything is feminized. So the feminine T,
it's always there, sometimes in the form of
the flat T, the "tchu." So it's a more
pronounced sound, even. Not once is she ever referred
to with a male pronoun. All the text
throughout, whether it's Opening of the Mouth, solar
hymns, or pyramid texts, they're completely
modified grammatically to suit her gender. And that's what we see also,
in the iconography, whether her or Shepenwepet, her successor,
they take on royal rituals that even when Hatshepsut
had to take them, on she had to
assume male costume and regalia, whereas
these God's Wives, they appear completely feminine. In fact, they sometimes
appear extra voluptuous, as if to emphasize their curves. So that was my initial
interest in their texts, in addition to the value in
looking at why would someone use a text that was, at
that point, 2,000 years old for their own benefit. My work on her
texts showed that-- you know, the pyramid texts,
she had over 800 spells to choose from, 700-plus. And she only picked the eight. And those eight were
very precisely selected and very deliberately placed
along the walls of her chapel, that their placement
complemented the content. So it was very
intelligent design-- if I may borrow a phrase-- in terms of selecting the
architectural form, in terms of deciding on the layout. And of course, and then
I got so wrapped up in the idea of the [INAUDIBLE]
reading of the Opening of the Mouth Ritual. And I spent some
years looking at that. So my involvement with
Harwa was essentially not to look at gender issues, but
rather to strictly look at whether I can make a case
for the [INAUDIBLE] reading for the Opening of
the Mouth there. And of course, I'm
still working on this because it's a mess
on many levels. But what came out of that
is that they so clearly have such very different texts, even
though on the outside, if you just list them, OK, versions
of Book of the Dead, chapter 15 for solar
hymns, pyramid texts, Opening of the Mouth, you
would be tempted to think they are similar. But they could not
be more different. And in fact, his selections, at
least from the pyramid texts, are more in line with what you
find in that whole cemetery. So the Amenirdis
texts are unique. So it's not just that
they're different from his, but they're also different
from other contemporaries. There are two big tombs
from slightly later point in time, the Tomb of [INAUDIBLE]
and the Tomb of [? Irtieru, ?] both from the very late
25th Dynasty or the 26th. And again, they don't
have what she has, even though they're women. So at the moment, I'm involved
with [INAUDIBLE] project with Elena Pischikova so we can
have access to [? Irtieru, ?] who's a female scribe, by
the way, incidentally-- ANN BRAUDE: [INAUDIBLE] MARIAM AYAD: --in the service
of another God's Wife, Nitocris. So unfortunately, Elena
couldn't make it here today. But again, this selection
needs to be studied, not just in terms of
intertextuality, transmission, but why did the women
choose what they chose? And I think in our
field, in general, the questions of why are
always the hardest to answer. ANN BRAUDE: Right. MARIAM AYAD: But
we can [INAUDIBLE].. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON: I think
that we actually stepped on what you were trying to say. ANN BRAUDE: I just was-- thank you, Jackie. You know, we could
be flies on the wall and listen to you
talk for hours, but I also want to
invite our audience to type their
questions into the Q&A so that we can add them to
the discussion with these two scholars. So that's all I wanted to say. MARIAM AYAD: So-- JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
It's an interesting point that you bring up, that in each
of these examples that you've reviewed, I think that
very often, when people look at things
from ancient Egypt, that due to the
fact that it's so different from
modern Western art and modern Western religion,
that due to the religious precepts and ideas and concepts
of ancient Egypt, to a modern, it looks repetitive. It looks identical. It's only when you really start
to gain that insider view, so to speak, that you see
the differences stand out dramatically. And I think that, possibly,
this illusion of similarity is perhaps what has led us down
the garden path of assuming that this diversity of
belief, diversity of action, diversity of opinion,
and things like this can perhaps be elided over. And I think that one of the
things that you're bringing up, very successfully, is
that this demonstrates that identity can be found
in the actual selection of these texts. So this may be able to
give us a view into who these people were,
on that deep level, of what did they believe? What did they think? What did they value? And not only that,
what did they value so much that they
wanted to be sure that it was placed in
this public monument that is a monument not only
to them and their success and everything else, but
also that will, indeed, influence their identity
in the afterlife as well? And I think that,
again, it's something that some people don't realize,
is that in ancient Egypt, your soul could inhabit
your text after you died. And so you don't just-- so it's not just there
on your tombstone, like it is today,
to talk to somebody who is visiting your tomb. Instead, it's about you,
yourself, can actually then go into a text and
your soul can actually be embodied on this living
realm if it contains your name. And so this speaks to an
enormous amount of identity and questions of self. And so I think that the
questions of evidence, how can we get at the
evidence of identity or individual belief? I think the Egyptians
are showing us exactly what they thought
and what they felt, it's just that we're not
listening to them in a way. MARIAM AYAD: And also not
only are we not listening, I encountered, while
working on the Opening of the Mouth, this
attitude that these texts don't deserve any analysis. They are often
treated by scholars as if they're wallpaper. And you have to wonder,
why would they select them if they were not relevant? JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON: Exactly. MARIAM AYAD: And there's a
question here about whether-- you comment on fluidity,
which would make it easier for us to study the religion. I'll let you answer that. I have my own thoughts,
but you go first, and-- JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
So I want to make sure that I actually read it. So yeah, it's a
really great question. So the thing is that-- "to interpret without
feeling that they're reading of meaning is--"
Yeah, so in that case, so Egyptologists are-- ANN BRAUDE: Jackie, I think we
should reiterate the question. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON: OK. Sorry. ANN BRAUDE: And perhaps I can
help with that, to give you just a minute to think. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON: Go for it. Do it. Do it. ANN BRAUDE: So we have
a wonderful question from Professor Rami Ali, who's
joining us from the American University in
Cairo, where she is a professor in the
anthropology department. And so she's bringing the
anthropological perspective, which I love. And she asks that, "if Egyptian
religion was very fluid, as Professor
Williamson suggests, shouldn't that suggest
that the ritual was subject to interpretation? And shouldn't that
make it easier for Egyptologists to interpret
without feeling that they're reading of meaning fixes or
curtails other interpretations? Speaking as an
anthropologist, we encounter these problems of
representation all the time, but we try and
contextualize and illustrate why particular readings
are reasonable while always being partial." JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
And I think that this is a great point. And this is exactly
the sort of thing that I think that we
need to start bringing more of into our field. Again, one of the things
that we have in Egyptology is that our field is a
relatively young one. And so we actually
really only understood ancient Egyptian language
in a sophisticated way. I want to emphasize
that, sophisticated way, since maybe 1920s, 1930s. And the Egyptians
had 3,000 years to tell us a lot of
stuff in their text. As a result, we're
still paddling like crazy ducks
against a stream, trying to gather together
all of this basic data. So one of the problems
that we have, as a field, is that we have this
deep sense that we know we can't put our
fingers around all the data because we don't have it yet. This is the difference between
sort of like-- and I'm not-- I agree with you completely. I want to emphasize that. I agree with you
completely, that one of the problems, I
think, that we have is that we want to
encompass stuff. And it's very difficult to do. First off, for 3,000
years, and then also we know that we
don't have the data. And the data that we do have
is fragmentary and problematic. And so this leads to this
sort of excessive caution. And Egyptology being, again,
at its very basis, is very old fashioned, almost Germanic
field of extreme positivism. We want to point at
something and say, see, that's the answer, because it's
a little bit easier, I think. And I think that you're
exactly right that anthropology offers a more
fluid approach that is actually more-- the Egyptian
religion was not so-- one God can turn into another
God, often its equal opposite. And Egyptians didn't
believe the same thing all over the same country. One area, one town, would
believe a totally different creation myth than the
one right up the road. And that was fine. That was considered
completely fine. Like it wasn't-- they never went
to war over religion in that way that we do now. And so trying, as moderns, to
sort of encompass this fluidity becomes very problematic,
I think, for Egyptologists. MARIAM AYAD: And-- JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON: I want
to know what you think, Mariam. MARIAM AYAD: If I may
interject something here, I think another
problem that we have is that we often tend
to treat the 3,000 years of Egyptian culture
as if they're monolithic, when they're quite different. So diachronic pronouncements
that plagued the earlier literature, taking some bits of
information from pyramid texts and then something from
the Greco-Roman period, and meshing them as if they
present a coherent narrative is just fiction. So I think for young students
and graduate students, one of the major
struggles is they want a linear narrative
of religion or art, especially of religion,
and there isn't [INAUDIBLE] And if you try to
push them too hard, you think synchronically
rather than diachronically, then they can become
frustrated or let it be. So back to Rami's point--
and he's a dear colleague-- is Egypt-- so the
question presumes that you want to understand
the religion, Rami. And unfortunately, our
field is so descriptive, to the extent that we forget
that these religious practices, these religious
beliefs were practiced. So often, we're so
wrapped up into-- JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
That's a good way to put it. That's a really
good way to put it. MARIAM AYAD: So often,
we're so wrapped up in the manifestation of the
different gods, or the 75 names of Amun-Re, which is,
again, a constructed number. It's not a real number. And we forget that
for one individual, they may have just known the
god in one name, at one point. And that's it. And again, it's
like Jackie said, we're very positivist,
data driven field. But sometimes, even when the
data's there, it's become-- because we have an
embarrassment of riches, in terms of how much evidence
we have, then the attitude is, hmm, can we really
trust that evidence? Maybe it's not quite
representative, especially if it goes
against some ingrained bias. And I've come across that
in my own work repeatedly. So if people believe that
the Opening of the Mouth is just there as
wallpaper, it's very hard to move them to an idea of
seeing how these texts actually functioned, in a
particular monument, to enact the revivication
of a deceased, for instance. And that's not even
talking about gender. That's just talking about
pre-conceived ideas. And people are very hard
pressed to change and to make any changes in their mindset. And then they move to the
other side of it, is-- so these women, all these
chantresses, they had-- there's so many that were
Chantresses of Amun . And if there were that
many, then the title must have been honorific. But then the material
culture evidence is that these women
were very wealthy. So they try to decouple the
title from the accumulation of wealth that is so evident. And the objects
in the museums are treated as disembodied objects,
as if they did not ever belong to anyone, let alone
being a mummy case for someone. So I can rant forever. ANN BRAUDE: Well,
before you do that, we just have a few more
minutes and we have some fascinating questions. So I'm going to read
two different questions and let both of you chime in
during our last few minutes here. We have a fascinating question
from another Egyptologist, Solange Ashby, who asks-- she says, "Certainly, it
can't be any coincidence that Amenirdis felt completely
comfortable feminizing her funerary texts
as a Kushite woman from a culture where
powerful women are so central to the society." So I'd love to hear
you comment on that, but I also want to throw out
another really fascinating question from a recent research
associate, the sociologist Jyoti Puri, who asks
about a larger question. "What is the role of
death and mortuary rituals in Egyptology?" So she wants to know
what this can tell us, not just about the dead,
but also about death itself. And, yeah. I'll-- JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
So Mariam, why don't I let you answer that
first question, because that's definitely
in your bailiwick. MARIAM AYAD: OK. So Solange, great
that you are with us. Very excited to have you. Definitely. Amenirdis comes from a very
long line of powerful women, and then her successors
back in Nubia continue to perform,
very visibly, in the temple, smiting
enemies, mastering power. Yeah, so the Nubian
connection's definitely there. Her immediate predecessor,
Shepenwepet I, as you know from the
presentation I did for students earlier, was also quite
unique in appropriating a lot of royal
rituals, including the suckling by a goddess,
the crowning by Amun-Re. So I agree with you that
Amenirdis, as a Kushite woman, would have been very
proud of her femininity. But also, she came
into a position where already the unthinkable
had happened, with Shepenwepet I, with the appropriation
of these very sacred scenes, royal scenes. So it's not an
either/or proposition. I think it's both,
that being a Kushite enabled her to fill that
role more comfortably. One of the earliest
papers I published talked about the demise of the
office, in which I actually argued that once the
Persians invaded Egypt, they couldn't appoint a Persian
woman as a God's Wife of Amun because Persian
women in the court were not socialized
to become independent, not financially and
not, definitely, to hold any position of power. So Shepenwepet
established her power as a [INAUDIBLE] God's Wife. Amenirdis, as a Kushite,
saw that as an opportunity and capitalized on
it, expanded on it. And her texts
[INAUDIBLE] a unique-- none of the others have
such an extensive selection of funerary texts. [INTERPOSING VOICES] --do the other about
funerary religion. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON: Sure. So how exciting is that? I mean, oh my god,
I could listen to you talk forever about-- I mean, first off, hello,
the name Shepenwepet. Can we just say that
many, many times? That's awesome. So one of the things that's
really an interesting point here, that, actually,
I kind of want to take this question about
death and mortuary identity and sort of turn it
into a broader sort of examination of our field. One of the things that I
think that many people think is because the majority of
the evidence that we have, that's shown on the
Discovery Channel or whatever and the stuff that is really,
really well preserved, is mortuary. And so what this gives is
an accidental perception that the Egyptians were
obsessed with death. And they weren't. It's just that those are the
sparkliest, most interesting monuments that catch the eye. You can't ignore
a pyramid, and you can't ignore these amazing
Gods Wives monuments because they're huge,
they're beautiful, they're extraordinary. But of course, they're
designed to last forever because that's their
job, is to last forever. And so we do have evidence for
daily life, beliefs and things like this. And so what this can
do though is this gives the misperception
that the Egyptians were obsessed with death. They were not. They were actually
obsessed with life. They loved living,
and they were-- and that's one of the reasons
that we see this attempt to continue this eternal life. And so when we do
examine material, very often, it
ends up dovetailing into these ideas of
death because that's the best preserved evidence. However that's not the
majority of our evidence. And so it does give the sort
of misleading understanding about not only Egyptians,
but also Egyptology in and of itself,
because there's a lot of [INAUDIBLE] that
we do that has nothing to do with death either. And so that's just sort of that. So we actually don't study
those sorts of ideas. I mean, because it's
actually wouldn't be-- I think if you went up
to an ancient Egyptian-- now, of course, our colleagues
here may fundamentally disagree with me
about this-- but I think that if we ask them
sort of existential questions that we have today about
death, life, et cetera. I think that their
cultural viewpoint would have been so fundamentally
different that I don't know that they would
have even asked the same kinds of questions. And this is the problem,
I think, in our field, is trying to figure
out what questions do we need to even ask. Because sometimes, we're
asking the wrong question or fundamentally asking
the wrong question because it's not how the
Egyptians view their world. And it's one of the hardest
aspects of our field, is trying to figure out what
questions to ask properly to put ourselves in
that Egyptian mindset. So it's a great question. It's a really, really
great question. MARIAM AYAD: And if I
may just say one thing. The bias also has to do
with the types of monuments that survive. The Egyptians lived
in mud brick houses, but built monuments of stone
for eternity, literally, for their tombs and
[INAUDIBLE] So the evidence has this inherent bias. But also, in terms of
the genesis of our field, people were very
interested in glittery, beautiful, objects for
their museum collections. So they would toss away
the daily life pots and keep the golden ones
meant for the afterlife. But essentially, what I'm trying
to do this year is in a way, take a step back. Because any time we find change,
the change implies agency. Some actor made a
decision about something, and that decision is made within
the cultural context in which they live in, but
that decision also has an impact on their ecosystem
and their cultural context. So it's a cycle. But unless we look
at these decisions as based in the individual, work
on [INAUDIBLE] selections then becomes mute--
moot, rather. And muted, both, because who
made these selections, right? So this idea of
intertextuality-- I think a colleague,
[INAUDIBLE] is in the audience, and he's been doing a
lot of good work on this. But who made those selections? Who made those quotations and
inserted them in later texts? So the agent is there. It's the idea of
trying to identify who the agent is and
their impact long term. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
I know that we're also starting to kind of go
over our time limit here, so God bless the people
who are still hanging on. But one of the
things, I think, that is so fascinating about
this is the question is, who, then, is the agent? Who is decide, so
to speak, who is deciding the selection of text? And it does seem that if you
say, for example, as Mariam and I were talking about
before, if you go back to the reign of Amenhotep
III, which is before this time period that we're talking about,
for the God's Wives of Amun, a lot of Amenhotep
III's courtiers took part in his jubilee
ceremonies, of which he had many. And a lot of them--
it's a big deal to be part of these things. And so a lot of them will show
the moments of those rituals that they, themselves,
participated in. So that could not have been
a selection by the artist. That had to be the owner
of the tomb saying, hey, I want you to show
the ritual where I did this thing because that's
important for my identity and my role in my society. And so this has to
be on my tomb walls. So if it was just a question
of, oh, all the people who who took part in
the jubilee festival have to show the jubilee
festival, which might just be Amenhotep III standing
there in his jubilee regalia, then it would be identical. It would be identical from
tomb to tomb to tomb to tomb. But they're not. They're fundamentally different. And that, in and of
itself, indicates that the owner of the tomb
is playing a very active role in terms of the decision
making process of what actually goes on these tomb walls. And that most
certainly then also indicates that the
God's Wives of Amun are most certainly, who are--
and the God's Wives of Amun were phenomenally powerful. I mean, they were on
the level of the king. In some instances,
more powerful, depending upon what
time period you're in. And why would they not
then have equal agency in selecting not only the
content, the images and et cetera, that they
put on their tombs? And that, again, also
indicates, again, if this is a
conscious selection, then that means that's a
reflection of that person, it's a reflection
of their interests, and a reflection of their ideas. And so that's very exciting. And if we can start
looking at it in that way, not as an abstract, as you
were saying so brilliantly, wallpaper, but rather
as them telling us. So it's like in fiction, right? What do they tell you? They tell you to
show and not tell. Well, they're showing us,
not telling us, you know? And so why don't we listen
to what they're showing us? MARIAM AYAD: I'll tell you
why, very briefly, if I may, Ann, for a minute here. There is a presumption
of ignorance that permeates our
scholarship, as regards to ancient Egyptians. And it doesn't
matter whether you're talking about a woman, like a
God's Wife, who I believe was, of course, highly educated,
but other people may disagree. But it also speaks
to regular people. The question of literacy
has been coming up over and over and over again,
to the extent that I believe there's a paper
published recently about questioning whether the
kings themselves were literate. And I think the conclusion
at the end, yes, they were. But they had to make this
very elaborate argument to construct why
they were literate. So again, how can you make
a choice if you cannot read? Or if someone narrates
the text to you, are you well educated
enough, versed enough in the funerary literature
to know what you want? So I think in our
scholarship, sadly, there's this presumption of ignorance
that we apply across the board to ancient Egyptians, to
the advantage and benefit of these mysterious priests
who are never named, and who are the designers
of everything single thing. ANN BRAUDE: So I'm going
to ask one last question, and then we are going to close. We've gone a bit
over, but this is such a fascinating conversation
and there are still 50 people on the call. So we will invite them
for another two minutes. I'm going to give the last
question to Professor Jacob Olupena, who extends
this conversation with the observation that-- well, a question, really,
of whether our students' overexposure to Western
epistemology and theories is a problem in their
scholarship and in your field, in particular. And he asks, "Is contemporary
Egyptian life and culture helpful in
understanding the past?" And I just want to extend
that question to give Mariam an opportunity to reflect,
with us, on your decision to move back to Egypt and to
be an Egyptian Egyptologist in Egypt, which is a fairly
unusual category and one that I think is extremely important. And I would love to hear you
respond to Professor Olupena with any observations you
want to offer on that issue. MARIAM AYAD: Thank you, Ann. Well, I would like
to bring in Jackie about the Western epistemology,
because in my view, our field suffers from a
dearth of theory, to the extent that a colleague shared that
their dissertation advisor told her off when she tried to bring
in some anthropological theory to understand Egyptian religion. So she had to toss out that
chapter and rewrite it. And he said to her,
point blank, we don't do a anthropological
theory here. And that's a very
prestigious institution. I think she's still on the call,
so she can or cannot identify. I may have misrepresented that. And that's just my impression. But again, my training
has been very skewed. I've been an Egyptologist
since undergraduate. I could do that AUC,
as an undergrad. I did a degree in Egyptian
literature and archaeology as an MA, and I did a
degree in Egyptology. So coming to this, sometimes
I feel very ill equipped. So that's why I doubly
appreciate the opportunity to be here this year, because
of the interdisciplinary conversations I'm able to have. And I've been learning so
much on a practical level and on a theoretical level,
just on issues of even agency, right? So that's about the theory. But again, my training
is very skewed. Very immersed in the field. In terms of
contemporary Egyptians, contemporary Egyptians,
for the most part, are quite divorced
from their past. They don't view themselves
so much as descendants of the pharaohs unless
there's a soccer match and they want to ramp
up the [INAUDIBLE] But generally speaking,
I've had a mentor, currently a
colleague, at the AUC, whose work has really
focused on cultural idiom, whether it's in
religious practice or in the vernacular
of Egyptian Arabic. And she's ingrained in me, and
in her own work, the importance of doing ethno-Egyptology and
the success she's had there. So I've tried to
apply some of it, like if there's a turn of phrase
that is especially cumbersome to render in English,
then if I think of it in colloquial
Egyptian, then it makes sense and I can provide an intimate
translation occasionally. There's also, according to her
work, some religious practices that have to do with
having a meal at the tombs, with the deceased, on feast
days, that are still practiced. Certain phrases
that are said today in commemoration of
the departed that we can show our direct
descendants of tomb decoration, like the [INAUDIBLE]
at the top of the tomb is something that's
often referred to. And she's been able to
demonstrate that these are essentially Egyptian and not-- because, you know, Egypt
had a lot of cultures and it's been a long
time since then. But in these two
instances or more, that was very
clearly demonstrated. But aside from
that, Egyptians are totally decoupled from
their past, to the extent that they can desecrate
and loot monuments. And they think that
these monuments belong to the tourists. There's no sense of national
ownership of that culture. And it's sad and
breaks our hearts. And that's partly
why I moved back. Ann, to circle back
to your question, because one of my
colleagues Monica Hanna, has been very vocal
about the importance of cultural preservation. And she's a very
courageous woman, and did tremendous work
combating looting and shedding light on the state of
looting since 2011. And I thought, you know, I'm
here in a comfortable job, tenured in Memphis, but
essentially isolated from all the action. And in the fervor
post-2011, I thought maybe the most
revolutionary thing I can do is move back and be the
best scholar I can be, where I may be more needed. But it turns out I'm still
in an ivory tower at AUC. It's quite isolated. But outside of school and the
limited number of students that we have, I may be
able to support colleagues who are in the field there. ANN BRAUDE: Well,
thank you so much. I think that's a
wonderful place for us to put a period on this
fascinating conversation. I really want to thank you both
for illuminating not only how much and how important it is
for Egyptologists to learn from gender theory, but also how
students of religion and gender can learn from Egyptology,
and how much we have to learn about the
limitations of our own time specific and very
modernly oriented database that has been the basis
for most gender theory. So it's really
wonderful to have both of you pushing in
both directions for an interdisciplinary
conversation, including both gender
and Egyptology. Please join me in thanking
these two scholars for a wonderful conversation. MARIAM AYAD: Thank you, Jackie. JACQUELYN WILLIAMSON:
Thank you, Mariam. This was a lot of fun. And hello to all
of our dear friends in the attendees column, who
are still there, 37 of you. God bless all of you. And it's lovely to see you all. ANN BRAUDE: And we look
forward to seeing all of you at another WSRP lecture. And if you're an Egyptologist
working in gender studies, please apply to become
a future research associate at Harvard
Divinity School. [MUSIC PLAYING]
