For a Contextual Approach

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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, it is 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 unusually rich, albeit not necessarily representative, archaeological context. Despite this, the globally dispersed, largely unpublished corpus has not been gathered together, let alone analysed as a whole.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 project aims to advance the understanding of private statuary practice in Deir el-Medina by studying statues representing individuals from the New Kingdom (chiefly Dynasty 19) village, of any size and material (generally stone or wood), and of secured or probable provenance. 

The research will build upon a pilot study undertaken as a 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, either in stores or in situ. The latter comprises perhaps up to 300 better-preserved ‘diagnostic’ pieces and some 700 less informative, ‘non-diagnostic’ fragments. Access is largely secured by established relations with curators and a signed agreement with the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO), which holds the concession for the site. 

Beyond an approach combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the research will deepen 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 assessed in light of selected models of analysis. Finally, the analysis will be enriched with comprehensive case studies.

 

Overall, the research will reveal how Deir el-Medina’s inhabitants—and possibly other ancient Egyptians—advertised themselves in three dimensions to deities, peers, and descendants.

 

Research Aim and Questions

 

The overarching aim is:

 

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

 

In keeping with the “contextualisation” effort underpinning current Deir el-Medina studies, as led by Andreas Dorn, Todd Gillen and Stéphane Polis, less focused on “what the inhabitants did per se” than on “understanding how and whythey did it” (2018: 14), the research objectives comprise the following interdependent questions:

 

• What statues 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 make these particular choices for self-presentation, especially in relation to various audiences within such a close-knit community of educated and skilled artists?​

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An Opportunity to Open New Paths

 

The proposed research gathers a largely unknown and/or unpublished corpus from an otherwise high-profile Egyptian site, deploying an already tested, thoroughgoing analytical methodology on statues in closely knit domestic, cultic, and funerary contexts. It should reveal how and why the village’s inhabitants used statuary to present themselves to contemporary and future human audiences, as well as to the next world. The resulting open-access database as well as the distinctive contextual evidence should help scholars working on statuary in other contexts by offering valuable comparanda and new insights.​

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