For a Contextual Approach

 

The approach to ancient Egyptian statuary is often focused on individual examples, typological studies, or art historical considerations, even in the most recent literature, admittedly hindered by the lack of evidence inherent to portable antiquities extracted from their original environment. In contrast, statues from the New Kingdom artists’ village of Deir el- Medina (Dynasty 18 to 20, c. 1500-1000 BCE, situated on the West Bank of ancient Thebes / modern Luxor) come with an exceptionally rich, albeit not necessarily representative, archaeological context, and yet the globally dispersed, largely unpublished corpus has not been gathered, let alone analysed as a whole. This offers a significant opportunity to assess the conceptualisation, production, and use of statues by holistically recontextualising them with the exceptional wealth of data provided by an environment encompassing settlement(s), temple(s), and necropolis(es).

 

This research aims to advance the understanding of the non-royal statuary practice in Deir el-Medina by studying statues representing individuals from the New Kingdom village, of any size and material, and of secured or probable provenance.

It builds upon a pilot study undertaken as Master’s dissertation by extending the source corpus from complete statues held in museums to all relevant pieces, fragmentary or not, in museums and, most importantly, still on site (in stores or in situ), thanks to a collaboration with the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) holding the concession for the site.

Furthermore, the research deepens the contextual (archaeological, visual, and textual) analysis, notably of the better-documented statues remaining on site, while gathering further material and socio-historical insights.

Most importantly, the artists’ self-presentation strategies and their effects will be discussed more extensively in light of selected models of analysis, notably Kjølby’s “decision-making process” (2007), Gell’s “material agency” approach (1998), and Nyord’s subsequent ontological considerations (2020), and illustrated in three comprehensive case studies.

 

In fine, the research will reveal how Deir el-Medina’s inhabitants—and possibly other ancient Egyptians—advertised themselves in three dimensions to peers, descendants, and deities, questioning our very own, contemporaneous, self-presentation craze.

 

Research Aim and Questions

 

The overall aim of the research will be as follows:

 

To advance the understanding of the non-royal statuary self-presentation practice in Deir el-Medina’s environment by regrouping and recontextualising the artefacts.

 

In line with the new “contextualisation” effort recognised in Deir el-Medina studies by Dorn, Gillen and Polis, less focused on “what the inhabitants did per se” than aimed at “understanding how and why they did it” (2018: 14), the research objectives will pursue the following interdependent questions, related to that practice as traditional, regular, artistic, economic, cultural, and religious activity involving beliefs, ideas, skills, as well as interactions and behaviours:

 

• What three-dimensional representations did Deir el-Medina’s inhabitants want and design for themselves, in terms of type, material, size, iconography, technique, style, and inscriptions?

• How did they conceptualise, commission, produce, exchange, use, and possibly reuse their statues over time, between village, temple, and necropolis?

• Why did they do it, with regard to their self-presentation choices towards various audiences in the context of a closely knit community of educated and skilled artists?

 

An Opportunity to Open New Paths

 

The proposed research encompasses a largely unknown and/or unpublished corpus from an otherwise high-profile site, deploying an already tested, comprehensive analytical methodology on statues in closely knit domestic, cultic, and funerary contexts, and aims to reveal how and why the village’s inhabitants really used statuary to present themselves to a contemporary, otherworldly, and future audience. The resulting open-access database as well as the gathered contextual evidence will help scholars working on statuary elsewhere with valuable comparanda and new insights.

www.deirelmedina.art

​