Overview

Bodies are immanent element of socio-cultural negotiation. Since the 19th century, Egyptology has produced vast knowledge on the ancient Egyptian bodies (human, divine, animal), however, mainly by focusing on funerary aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. Different paradigm shifts and turns of the last few decades (hermeneutics, semiotics, social-constructivism, ontology etc.), echo through Egyptology, but are still not part of the dominant discourse. This is also the case for the so-called “body turn”, an important epistemological turning point, that came largely unnoticed in Egyptology. Previous body centred Egyptological publications are either too specific in their focus or too broad in their presentation of Ancient Egyptian corporealities. To balance this out and reflect the latest state of research, this volume brings together selected contributions from the fields of Egyptology and Northeast African Archaeology. The focus is on both conceptualizations of the bodies by ancient Egyptians and Egyptologists. The topics of the contributions cover familiar but also new aspects. They range from division of labour, disability, gender roles, erotic, magic, fragmented and narrated bodies, other-than-human corporealities, to questions of ethics and the place of Egyptology in current approaches to past bodies. Various textual, pictorial, and archaeological sources, as well as human remains, are analyzed both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. From the theoretical and methodological point of view, the publication provides deeper insights into a number of different approaches and their application to the ancient material (among others: osteoarchaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, semiotics, new materialism, ontology, etc.), which makes the book an important reading for all career stage Egyptologists (students to professionals) and the broader interested public.

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Dina Serova completed her PhD in Northeast African Archaeology and Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2021. Her doctoral thesis Nakedness and Nudity in Ancient Egypt: Epistemes, Lexemes and (Re-)Constructions explores body conceptualizations through texts, images, and archaeological remains, analyzing these primary sources within archaeological discourses from a diachronic perspective. Currently, Dina is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and teaches classes on Ancient Egyptian languages and written culture as well as their interpretation by means of theories and methods derived from sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and sociology. Since 2024, Dina is a Junior PI of the project Asymmetric Communication in Ancient Egypt within the Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register” where she investigates register knowledge and variation in Ancient Egyptian narrative and mortuary texts from a linguistic perspective. She is an active member of several international research groups and projects, such as Multimodal Communication in Ancient Egypt with Silvia Kutscher and the Middle Kingdom Theban Project led by Antonio J. Morales, which emphasize her academic diversity and broad research interests. Uroš Matić has obtained his PhD from the University of Münster (Germany) in 2017 and has since lectured at the Universities of Münster, Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck. He directed several stand-alone postdoctoral projects from 2018 to 2025 and participated on archaeological excavations and in museum studies in Egypt, Sudan and Lebanon. He received two prizes for his doctoral dissertation Body and Frames of War in New Kingdom Egypt: Violent Treatment of Enemies and Prisoners (Harrassowitz, 2019): the Philippika Prize of Harrassowitz in 2018 and Best Publication Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2020. Since 2009 he is a member of the European Association of Archaeologists and the community Archaeology and Gender in Europe, which he co-chaired from 2016 to 2019. He extensively published on archaeology of the body, war, violence, gender and sexuality, with most recent publications including Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2021), Beautiful Bodies. Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in the Past (Oxbow, 2022) and Current Archaeological Debates from a Gender Perspective (Springer, 2024, co-edited with Bisserka Gaydarska, Laura Coltofean and Marta Diaz Guardamino). He is co-editing the Element series Archaeology and Gender of the Cambridge University Press together with Katharina Rebay-Salisbury. He is also co-editing the series Hot Academia of Sidestone Press, together with Laura Coltofean and Bisserka Gaydarska.

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