Ethnic Identities in The Land of The Pharaohs

ancient Egypt
in Context
Ethnic identities
in the Land of
the Pharaohs
Uroš Matić
ISSN
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Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context
edited by
Gianluca Miniaci
University of Pisa
Juan Carlos Moreno García
CNRS, Paris
Anna Stevens
University of Cambridge and Monash University
ETHNIC IDENTITIES IN THE

LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
Past and Present Approaches

in Egyptology
Uroš Matić
Austrian Archaeological Institute
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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DOI: 10.1017/9781108885577
© Uroš Matić 2020
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Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs
Past and Present Approaches in Egyptology
Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context
DOI: 10.1017/9781108885577
First published online: November 2020
Uroš Matić
Austrian Archaeological Institute
Author for correspondence: Uroš Matić, [email protected]
Abstract: Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs deals with the
ancient Egyptian concept of collective identity, various groups which
inhabited the Egyptian Nile Valley and different approaches to ethnic
identity in the last two hundred years of Egyptology. The aim is to
present the dynamic processes of ethnogenesis of the inhabitants of
the land of the pharaohs, and to place various approaches to ethnic
identity in their broader scholarly and historical context. The dominant
approach to ethnic identity in ancient Egypt is still based on the culture-
historical method. This and other theoretically better-framed
approaches (e.g. instrumentalist approach, habitus, postcolonial
approach, ethnogenesis, intersectionality) are discussed using
numerous case studies from the third millennium to the first century BC.
Finally, this Element deals with the recent impact of the third science
revolution on archaeological research on ethnic identity in ancient
Egypt.
Keywords: ancient Egypt, ethnicity, culture-historical archaeology, habitus,

scientific racism
© Uroš Matić 2020

ISBNs: 9781108794466 (PB), 9781108885577 (OC)
ISSNs: 2516–4813 (online), 2516–4805 (print)
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 From Race to Culture and People: Egyptology

of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 15
3 Ethnic Identity: Recent Perspectives in Egyptology 34
4 Third Science Revolution 53
5 Concluding Remarks 60
References 64
Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs 1
‘Today these are troubled waters which most people who write about ancient Egypt
from within the mainstream of scholarship avoid.’
B. J. Kemp (2018: 47)
1 Introduction
This Element introduces various readers to ancient Egyptian collective identity
and Egyptological research on ethnicity. The chronological boundaries will not
play a significant role here; still, each case discussed in the text will be
chronologically and geographically framed. Most of the provided examples
are from the third and second millennium BC in Egypt and Nubia, which is the
period of my scholarly interest. However, as this Element should serve to give
readers an overview of works on ethnic identity and ethnicity in Egyptology,
examples from first millennium BC are also provided.
It is not possible to summarise ancient Egyptian history in great detail in a single
passage without using Egyptology specific terms such as dynasties, kingdoms, or
intermediate periods. Still, several phases of Egyptian history are referred to
throughout this Element and it is therefore necessary to summarise them. The
formation of the ancient Egyptian state started around 3200 BC in the Naqada region
in Upper Egypt. By around 3000 BC, this proto-state expanded to include Lower
Egypt and establish domination over southern Levant. It also had contact and
conflict with the population in Lower Nubia. Around 2700 BC, began a period of
monumental funerary constructions (pyramids), building of monumental temples,
and expeditions to foreign lands such as Byblos in Lebanon, Nubia (Sudan), and
Punt at the Horn of Africa. Around 2200 BC, the state lost its control of the
provinces where local rulers slowly but surely took over. The domain of the
successor state was limited to Lower Egypt. In Upper Egypt, local rulers of
Thebes managed to defeat their rivals and form their own kingdom. They eventu-
ally defeated the state in Lower Egypt and united the land around 2055 BC. Since
the unification, more investment is seen in monumental architecture again. Military
fortresses were built in Lower Nubia to support the expeditions and diminish the
threat from even further south (Kerma in Upper Nubia). Eastern Delta, a corridor to
Egypt with mixed population since prehistory, became the entry point for popula-
tion from the Levant. There is evidence for close ties with Byblos. Around 1800 BC,
the state again lost its power in the provinces and its fortresses in Lower Nubia.
Rulers of foreign origin known as the Hyksos took over the control of Eastern Delta
and later on of the entire Lower Egypt. The kingdom of Kush, centred in Kerma,
took control of Egyptian military fortresses in Lower Nubia. The kings centred in
Thebes, now had to fight the Hyksos state in the north and the kingdom of Kush in
the south. They eventually defeated their rivals and united the land around 1550 BC.
This is when a period of expansion began. Egypt took control of both Levant and
2 Ancient Egypt in Context
Nubia. Egyptians settled in Nubia and built military fortresses in the Levant. Egypt
had close contacts with Aegean polities from fifteenth to fourteenth century BC, but
also conflict with state Mitanni and eventually with the Hittite state in which it lost
control of the northern Levant. Conflicts with the Libyans in the west and the
incursion of various groups of Sea People marauders brought new challenges to the
pharaohs. Around 1100 BC, Egypt lost control of its domains in both Levant and
Nubia and faced internal fractured rule as it also lost its control of Thebes where
priests of Amun became powerful. The state in this period was divided between the
kings of Egypt ruling in Lower Egypt and the priests and god Amun ruling in
Middle and Upper Egypt. A rival state was slowly but surely also forming in Nubia,
now under control of the locals. Around 950 BC, Egypt was united again for
a century or so, and after that again fell into a fragmentary state, with several
parallel dynasties and rulers of Libyan origin controlling different parts of the
country. Around 750 BC, the Nubian rulers took this opportunity and defeated
different dynasties in Egypt, establishing a double kingdom. They were in war with
Assyria, which was their downfall around 670 BC. Egypt was left to a local dynasty
which ruled the country until around 530 BC when the Achamenide Persian empire
expanded to Egypt. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great defeated Persian-controlled
Egypt and a Ptolemaic state was formed in 305 BC and ruled by a dynasty of
Macedonian origin. This dynasty was eventually a client state of Rome and was
defeat in 31 BC by Octavian August who made Egypt into a Roman province in
30 BC. From fourth to sixth century AD, Christian Roman Egypt was a diocese,
regional governance district in the late Roman empire. Around 650 AD, it was
conquered by the Arabs.
During this more than 3,000-year-long history, both how ancient Egyptians
viewed themselves and others and which foreigners lived among them was
changing. Therefore, three main questions will be addressed in this Element:
a) How did ancient Egyptians understand their own collective identity in

comparison to their neighbours and other foreigners, and can this be trans-
lated into a modern concept such as ethnic identity? Answering this question
is important because we need to balance ancient concepts and our transla-
tions of these concepts into our own vocabulary and theoretical discourses.
b) How did early scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth century approach
ancient Egyptians and their neighbours and are there remnants of their ideas in
contemporary Egyptology? The reason this question has to be addressed is
that more often than not certain ideas belonging to a disciplinary past emerge
in a new form in contemporary scholarship (Matić, 2018a).
c) How do modern scholars approach various groups inhabiting the Egyptian
Nile Valley? Are contemporary discussions on ethnic identity useful in
approaching ancient Egypt? We need to critically reflect on the concepts we

use in order to better understand how they form our interpretations and what
we can do to balance the premodern–modern dichotomy.
1.1 The Categories of Evidence

Egyptology is a discipline dealing with the history, society, language, and
culture of ancient Egypt. Although often criticised because of its narrow
philological focus on ancient Egyptian texts and language, there have been
considerable developments in the last few decades which also turn attention to
more up-to-date understanding of archaeology and art history (Kemp, 2018;
Verbovsek, Backes & Jones, 2011; Wendrich, 2010). Depending on the period
of ancient Egyptian history they focus on, Egyptologists are in a unique position
in comparison to other scholars dealing with ancient cultures because of the rich
visual, textual, and archaeological evidence at hand. The categories of evidence
important for studying ethnic identity in ancient Egypt are:
1 Visual Sources
Subjugating the enemy is a motif known in ancient Egyptian iconography since
around 3500 BC (Köhler, 2002: 511) and detailed depictions of enemies from
around 3200 to 3000 BC predate the first texts mentioning various groups of
enemies (Bestock, 2018). These testify to already developed ideas on ʻusʼ and
ʻthemʼ. For example, already on the so-called Libyan palette from this period,
a throwstick hieroglyph is used in association with seven towns depicted being
destroyed. This sign is later used to designate Ṯmḥ.w or Ṯḥn.w Libyan groups, as
Egyptians called some of their neighbours in the west (de Wit, 2015: 650). By the
time the hieroglyphic script appears in its fully developed form, we can also
recognise specific types of enemies in iconography. Traditional enemies and
neighbours of Egypt in the south-Nubians, the north-Syro-Palestianians and the
west-Libyans are a recurrent motif in ancient Egyptian art over several millennia
(Figure 2; Roth, 2015). We find them as bound captives or as enemies on the
battlefield, but also as trade partners and inhabitants of Egypt of different status
and occupations (e.g. slaves, soldiers, musicians, dancers). The contexts in which
their representations are found in different periods of ancient Egyptian history
range from small objects such as palettes, throne chairs, cosmetic vessels, wooden
boxes, walking sticks, weapons, chariots, and sandals to paintings and reliefs on
the walls of private and royal tombs and state temples (Anthony, 2016; Hallmann,
2006; Roth, 2015; Saretta, 2016). The common denominator behind these con-
texts is their elite background. Such representations provide us with a specific
view of a small percentage of the society with its own agenda and politics. The
advantages of visual representations of foreigners are not only that they provide
us with information on ancient Egyptian neighbours, but also that they provide us
with a specifically elite ancient Egyptian view of these peoples and the criteria of
difference. The disadvantage of visual representations is that they provide us
neither with the perspective of ancient Egyptian non-elites, which in some
contexts could have been different, nor with the perspective of those depicted.
These ideologically framed and culturally relative depictions of foreigners were
sometimes approached as accurate representations of reality (for details see
Section 2). However, several cases demonstrate that this was actually not entirely
the case (for details see Section 3).
2 Written Sources
The first written sources on foreigners in ancient Egypt appear very early,
c.3200–3000 BC, in the form of signs indicating foreign toponyms and ethnonyms,
as we have seen in the case of the Libyan palette. Already on the ivory label of King
Den from Abydos from the beginning of third millennium BC, an easterner is
depicted and his origin from the East is indicated in the accompanying text (Köhler,
2002: 504–5). Later on, starting from about mid third millennium BC (Gundacker,
2017; Saretta, 2016), foreigners are mentioned regularly in different texts ranging
from private elite autobiographies, royal texts on stelae, temple walls, and admin-
istrative documents to literary texts in which foreigners can also be some of the key
figures (Di Biase-Dyson, 2013; Loprieno, 1988). The advantage of the written
sources is that they provide us with personal names and places of origin of
foreigners, but also descriptions of their appearance and customs (Hinson, 2014).
The disadvantage of written sources is that the image of foreigners we obtain from
them was in fact probably not the image foreigners had of themselves. The way
they are described, named and grouped by the ancient Egyptians was ordered by
many factors and does not directly reflect the reality of foreign identities. Whenever
we read an ancient Egyptian text describing foreigners we should ask ourselves
who wrote it, when, for which audience, and why?
3 Foreign Material Culture in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Egyptian

Material Culture in Foreign Contexts
The most often used evidence for exchange and trade with the neighbouring
countries and regions, but also for tracing foreign presence in Egypt is the material
culture of foreign origin. This category among other things includes foreign pottery,
jewelry, and weaponry. Considerable amounts of foreign material culture made out
of organic materials is rarely preserved, but its presence in Egypt is indicated by
written and visual sources. The main disadvantage of foreign material culture in
Egypt or Egyptian material culture in foreign contexts is that it is often extremely
difficult to differentiate between an object imported through exchange and trade on

one side, and an object imported by a travelling or a resident foreigner on the other.
Although modern application of techniques from physical, chemical, biological,
and earth sciences and engineering, to address archaeological questions and prob-
lems, can sometimes provide us with the origin of the raw material from which these
objects were made, ʻforeignʼ objects could have also been made in local materials
by foreigners or imitated in local or imported materials by Egyptians. The fact that
not only objects can travel, but also artisans and raw materials, significantly
complicates the assumptions on origins no matter the analyses involved
(Feldman, 2006). The same is valid for Egyptian material culture outside of
Egypt, which can equally be imported through exchange and trade or through
actual presence of an Egyptian. The underlying problem is that foreign material
culture in Egypt and Egyptian material culture in foreign contexts is more often than
not interpreted as evidence for foreign or Egyptian presence and as such connected
to the question of ethnic identity. This is especially the case when foreign material
culture in Egypt is found in a burial in Egypt or when Egyptian material culture is
found in a burial outside of Egypt. If the burial also indicates Egyptian or foreign
burial customs, the case is taken as prime example of a foreigner in Egypt or an
Egyptian in a foreign land. The associated problems behind such assumptions are
extensively discussed in Section 2.
4 Skeletal Remains
Skeletal remains have been used to identify ancient Egyptians and foreigners since
the establishment of Egyptology as a discipline in the nineteenth century. Although
methods used to identify them changed from initial craniometrical measures and
racial assumptions (Section 2), to modern methods such as analyses of ancient
DNA and isotope analyses (Section 4), the underlying assumption is more often
than not that ethnic identity is something written in the body. The advantage of
skeletal remains is that DNA and isotope analyses can, among other things, provide
us with clues on the origin of a person, where they were born, spent their life, and
eventually died. However, these information should not be confused with ethnic
identity, which is a social construct related to a personʼs feeling of belonging to
a certain group, on one side, and the way others perceive the identity of this person,
on the other (Section 3).
1.2 Terms
Often, explicit theoretical and methodological statements in Egyptology are
lacking in research on social phenomena, such as ethnic identity and ethnicity.
Like in other archaeologies, few people actually explicitly define what they
mean by ethnic group or ethnicity (Jones, 1997: 56). The standard reference
works in Egyptology, such as Lexikon der Ägyptologie or The Oxford
Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, do not contain entries on ethnicity (Helck,
1977a; Helck, 1977b; Gordon, 2001). Some, like The British Museum
Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, even have an entry on race (Shaw & Nicholson,
1995: 239; see Section 2). Although slowly but surely appearing in works of
Egyptologists (e.g. Goudriaan, 1988; Köhler, 2002) and extensively discussed
by S. T. Smith (2003b), the first entry on ethnicity in a standard reference work
of encyclopedic format appeared relatively late in UCLA Encyclopedia of
Egyptology (Riggs & Baines, 2012). Thus, discussions on ethnicity outside of
Egyptology have gradually entered the discipline quite recently and are still
largely unknown even to most Egyptologists. This is why it is important to start
with a short list and definitions of terms frequently encountered in this Element:
1. Ancient Egypt designates a civilisation of ancient northern Africa primarily

concentrated in the Nile Valley from the Nile Delta in the north to the First
Cataract (shallow length where the water is broken by many small boulders) on
the Nile in the south (Figure 1). Ancient Egyptians called their land Kmt ʻblack
landʼ referring to fertile soil of the Nile Valley; T3-mry ʻbeloved landʼ indicating
an emotional relationship to their land; T3-wy ʻtwo landsʼ, a dual referring to
both Lower Egypt (T3-mḥ.w or T3-bity), from Nile Delta to Memphis (one of
the ancient capitals), and Upper Egypt (T3-šmc.w), from Memphis to
Elephantine on the First Cataract (Kilani, 2015: 75).
The ancient Egyptian state, which initially developed in the region of Naqada
in Upper Egypt around 3200 BC, first expended its territory to include the rest of
Upper Egypt and then Lower Egypt. In the course of its history, this state
managed to establish and lose its control of different own and neighbouring
regions such as Lower Nubia (from First to Second Cataract on the Nile) and
Upper Nubia (from Second to Sixth Cataract on the Nile) in the south and the
Levant in the north (Morris, 2018). Therefore, when talking about ancient Egypt
and ancient Egyptians we have to bear in mind that these terms do not refer to
a static society resistant to demographic, social, and cultural change (Schneider,
2003). Strictly speaking there is no such thing as ʻancient Egyptʼ and ʻancient
Egyptiansʼ. The land we refer to as ancient Egypt, although having its core in
the Nile Valley from the Delta to the First Cataract, either expanded or lost parts
of its territories only to regain control of them again. The people we refer to with
the term ancient Egyptians were men, women, and children of different class
backgrounds living in different towns and regions of the land. Some of them had
foreign origins; others were married to foreigners or to people of foreign origin.
Some never left their villages, towns, or regions; others travelled far away and
Figure 1 Map of Egypt and Sudan with sites frequently referred to in the
Element (graphic by A. Hassler, ÖAI/ÖAW).
frequently. Some spoke only ancient Egyptian language; others spoke other
languages too. A small percentage of the population was fully literate; a large
percentage was of limited literacy or no literacy at all. Some of them lived in
land ruled by a ruler of local origin and some in a land ruled by a ruler of foreign
origin. This diversity is important to stress from the very beginning and it will be
extensively discussed throughout the Element.
2. Race designates biological variations inscribed with explanatory value.

Scientific racism implies that physical attributes (mostly external, such as, e.g.
skin and hair colour) or morphological features of the skeleton (more often than not
the cranium) correspond to inner mental capacities (Siapkas, 2014: 68). According
to modern physical anthropology major features of human biological diversity are
polymorphic (variation within a group being quantitatively predominant), clinal
(i.e. structured as gradients), and culturally mediated. Folk taxonomies of races are
culture specific, as they develop from unique historical and demographic factors.
Therefore, agglomeration of physically diverse peoples into ‘races’ is culturally
determined (Williams, Belcher & Armelagos, 2005: 340–2). There is no biological
validity for the racial construct (Zakrzewski, Shortland & Rowland, 2016:
219–20). For example, M. Hefny, an Egyptian immigrant to the USA, considered
himself to be black. According to the rules of USA government on race and
ethnicity from 1997, all people originating in Europe, the Middle East, and North
Africa are classified as white. Hefny filed a lawsuit to change his official classifi-
cation from white to black (Saini, 2019: 4). Ancient Egyptians did not have the
concept of race, as their attitudes towards peoples were based on cultural status and
not colour (Foster, 1974: 187). Therefore, the concept of race, although paramount
for Egyptology of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, has no scientific
credibility in modern scholarship. Section 2 of this Element deals with the problem
of race and scientific racism in Egyptology because, although not based in modern
anthropology, these concept continue to exist in one form or another even in some
recent works.
3. Archaeological culture was best defined by Australian born archaeologist

V. G. Childe (1892–1957) who argued that: ‘We find certain types of remains
pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms constantly recurring
together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a “cultural group” or
just a “culture”. We assume that such a complex is the material expression of
what today we would call “a people”.’ (Childe, 1929: v–vi)
The concept of archaeological culture was marked by a modernist under-
standing of a nation state – a unity of territory, material culture, language, and
ethnic affiliation (Sherratt, 2005: 27; Thomas, 2004: 112). G. Kossina (1858–
1931), German linguist and archaeologist, developed an ethnic paradigm which
he called ‘settlement archaeology’ with the basic premise that artefact types
could be used to identify cultures and that clearly distinguishable cultural
provinces reflect the settlement areas of past tribes or ethnic groups (Jones,
1997: 2). This approach is quintessential for the so-called culture-historical or
traditional archaeology.
Section 2 of this Element deals with the use of the premises of culture-
historical archaeology on material culture and ethnic identity in Egyptology.
Although a theoretical position with flaws which have been recognised since
1960s, culture-historical archaeology is still the dominant way of thinking in
archaeology, including archaeology of Egypt. This is why it is necessary to
point again to its pitfalls and demonstrate them with several examples.
4. Ethnicity is a concept with a complex history (Jones, 1997; McInerney,

2014: 2). The word comes from the ancient Greek word ethnos which primarily
denoted a group of beings, humans or animals, which share certain characteristics
and form a group. Its use to designate different groups of foreigners is more related
to the fifth century BC and the writings of Herodotus (Isaac, 2004: 112; Sherratt,
2005: 31; Siapkas, 2014: 67). The concept of ethnicity can include many aspects
and their combination results in a group identifying itself as a people (McInerney,
2014: 2). M. Weber (1864–1920), German sociologist, has already argued for
many notions of ethnicity found in later scholarship, such as those that ethnic
groups are social constructs, based on a subjective belief in a shared community
(Jenkins, 2008: 10).
Ethnic labels are not fixed because the identities and the relations to which they
are applied are in a constant flux of inclusion and exclusion (McInerney, 2014: 3).
According to M. Fischer, ethnicity is ‘reinvented and reinterpreted with each
generation by each individual. . . . Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed
on from generation to generation, taught and learned; it is something dynamic, often
unsuccessfully repressed or avoided’ (Fischer, 1986: 195). It is not so much a ‘deep-
seated force surviving from the historical past’, but a process (Sollors, 1989: xiv–
xv). The task of archaeologists who attempt to research ethnic identity is to identify
those who choose to act or look the same, and then to explore the contexts in which
they do so and whether these changed over time (Lucy, 2005: 108).
The key reference in archaeological studies of ethnicity in the last two decades
has been the monograph Archaeology of Ethnicity by S. Jones (1997). According
to Jones, ethnic identity is ‘that aspect of a person’s self-conceptualisation which
results from identification with a broader group in opposition to others on the
basis of perceived cultural differentiation and/or common descent’ (Jones, 1997:
13). She understands ethnic identification as involving objectification of cultural
practices (unconscious behaviour) in the recognition and signification of
difference in opposition to others (Jones, 1997: 128). According to Jones ‘ethni-

city is a product of the intersection of similarities and differences in people’s
habitus and the conditions characterising any given historical situation’ (Jones,
1997: 126). For example, she argues that domestic architecture such as bath
houses and villas in Roman Britain were an important part of the habitus, and
these may have been involved in recognition and signification of a broad Roman
identity (Jones, 1997: 134). Section 3 deals with various contemporary
Egyptological approaches to ethnic identity and ethnicity in ancient Egypt.
Using several examples, this section will discuss how ethnic identities in ancient
Egypt have to be approached bearing in mind their diverse social and historical
contexts.
5. Habitus is a term primarily associated in sociology with P. Bourdieu (1930–

2002) and his theory of practice. According to Bourdieu it is composed of
‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed
to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and
organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their
outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery
of the operations necessary in order to attain them’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53).
According to R. Jenkins, habitus is ‘the embodied and unreflexive everyday
practical mastery of culture: unsystematic, the empire of habit, neither con-
scious nor unconscious’ (Jenkins, 2008: 79). Crucial for the concept of habitus
is that it involves unconscious dispositions people share towards certain
perceptions and practices such as daily tasks, labour skills, cooking, cleaning,
dressing, etc. Within this context, ethnic identity is understood as the result of
the intersection of one’s habitual dispositions and the social conditions in
existence within a particular historical context (Curta, 2014: 2508). The
reconceptualisation of Bourdieu’s habitus is related to the work of
G. C. Bentley who argued that ‘sensations of ethnic affinity are founded on
common life experiences that generate similar habitual dispositions’ (Bentley,
1987: 32). The concept of habitus has seen increased attention by scholars
studying ethnic identity in ancient Egypt and will be discussed on several
examples in Section 3.
1.3 Being Egyptian and Being Foreign: Over 3000 Years

of Ethnogenesis
‘Egyptian’ could be anyone who inhabited the urban zones of the Nile Valley
(Assmann, 1996: 97; Espinel, 2006: 452; Moers, 2001: 177), spoke Egyptian
language, worshipped Egyptian gods, and was loyal to the Egyptian state, no
matter if he or she was born in Egypt or not.
Where language is concerned, non-Egyptians were considered by Egyptians

to babble and the same word was used for the braying of a donkey (Johnson,
1999: 212). Similarly, the ancient Greek word barbaros, a reduplicative ono-
matopoeia, originally described the incomprehensible speech of any foreign
language, later to acquire the meaning of a non-Greek (Heath, 2005: 199).
Egyptian language was seen as one of the main criteria of Egyptianess since
at least the beginning of second millennium BC and even the Greek historian
Herodotus writes that Egyptians are those who live downriver from Elephantine
and drink the Nile water (II 18, 3) and foreigners are those who do not speak
their language (II 158, 5) (Kammerzell, 1993: 183).
Those who inhabited non-urban zones outside of the Nile Valley (e.g. marsh-
lands, [Hawkins, 2012] and the desert) or foreign lands, did not speak Egyptian,
did not worship Egyptian gods, and potentially threatened the Egyptian state
were considered to be foreign. Of course, in different periods and contexts these
factors come in different constellations. Foreign lands were considered undesir-
able to die in by Egyptians because of the danger of not being properly buried.
Already in the biography of Sabni, son of Menkhu I, from around 2280 BC, it is
written that after he died in Lower Nubia his body was returned to Egypt and
buried by his son (Gundacker, 2017: 347). This concern over burial in Egypt is
also evident in the Story of Sinuhe from early second millennium BC, when
Sinuhe, an Egyptian official, who after fleeing from Egypt to the Levant desires
to go back to Egypt and asks what is more important than being buried in Egypt
(Allen, 2015: 111). In the Story of Wemanun from eleventh century BC, when
Wenamun found himself in Byblos (modern Lebanon), he refused to see the
gravesite of Egyptian emissaries who died abroad (Di Biase-Dyson, 2013: 336).
Being buried back in Egypt was related to being close to the place of one’s life
on earth even in death.
According to J. Assmann and G. Moers, the ancient Egyptians did not have
the concepts of ethnic or national belonging and expressed their identity in
relation to family, village, or town and in connection to kinship, familiarity, and
trust (Assmann, 1996: 97; Moers, 2016). Localism as a crucial aspect of
Egyptian identity and being buried in one’s own city meant that the family
and friends of the deceased could assure one’s further existence through offer-
ings (Espinel, 2006: 452). This localism probably influenced regional differ-
ences. There is evidence that the inhabitants of the Nile Valley considered the
population of the Delta to be as different from the population of Upper Egypt as
an Egyptian is different from someone from the Levant. In the Story of Sinuhe,
he describes himself after fleeing to the Levant from Egypt ‘like a Deltan seeing
himself in Elephantine, like a man of the marshland in Bowland (Nubia)’
(Allen, 2015: 130). Hundreds of years later, similar binary opposition is attested
in the Papyrus Anastasi I (40, 3–4) from early thirteenth century BC, where ‘the
speech of a Delta man with a man from Elephantine’ is attested (Haring, 2005:
162). These texts testify to ancient Egyptian awareness of differences between
people of their own land being comparable to the differences between them and
foreigners.
There are also texts which mention criteria of difference recognised by
ancient Egyptians between themselves and others. Papyrus Bulaq 17 from
fifteenth century BC, invokes the creator god Atum and describes him in the
following way: ‘Atum who has made the population, who has distinguished
their characters, who has made them live, who has distinguished their colours,
one from the other’ (Wilson, 1969: 365–6). The Great Hymn to Aten from
fourteenth century BC found in the tomb of the courier and later king Ay is
particularly important as it provides us with a parallel for the earlier Papyrus
Bulaq 17 when the division of mankind is concerned:
You created the world in your fashion, you alone; this world of men, of herds,
and of wild beasts, of all that is on the earth and walks on legs, of all that is in
the air and flies with wings outstretched. Of all the foreign lands, from Syria
to Nubia and the land of Egypt. You set every man in his place. You supplied
their necessities. Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned. Their
tongues (ns.w) are separate in speech (md.t) and their natures (ḳd=sn) as well;
Their skins (jnm=sn) are distinguished, as you distinguished the foreign
peoples. (Lichtheim, 1976: 98)
It seems that what distinguishes people are the languages they speak, the
forms/characters they have and the colour of their skin. This choice of charac-
teristics to distinguish people is very interesting. S. T. Smith interprets it as
‘remarkably modern textual and visual construction of ethnicity, representing
ethnic groups as essentialized, distinctive traditions, bounded in space and time’
(Smith, 2014: 195). That Aten distinguished people according to these features
did not stop Heqanefer, who had Nubian origin, from depicting himself as an
Egyptian (ḳd-form) having different skin colour (jnm) and speaking different
language (ns.w md.t) than Aten (or the Egyptians) would attribute to Nubians
(see Section 3 for detailed discussion). A parallel is found in the Story of Sinuhe
when Sinuhe the Egyptian is described returning to Egypt by one of the king’s
children as an ‘Asiatic that the Asiatics have created’ (Allen, 2015: 142). Asiatic
is a term Egyptologists conventionally use as translation of ancient Egyptian
word c3 m.w referring to the inhabitants of Syria-Palestine.
Whereas some texts indicate essentialised view of Egyptians and foreigners
regarding their appearance and language, other texts and representations
indicate that appearance and language were subject to change, leading to
a change of both self-identification and perception by others. Ancient
Egyptian art used skin colour to differentiate between Egyptians (reddish),

Nubians (brown and black), Syro-Palestinians (yellowish), and Libyans
(whitish-yellowish), which could easily lead one to false conclusion that
skin colour was considered to be essential for one’s identity. Still, Aegeans
(‘Minoans’) and Puntites are also depicted with reddish skin colour like
Egyptians (Anthony, 2016) in fifteenth century BC Egyptian art, indicating
that they share something with Egyptians other foreigners do not. There is no
evidence that Egypt was in conflict with the Aegean polities and the land of
Punt at this time; rather the contrary, these lands are trading partners and are
in ancient Egyptian cultural geography located at the very ends of the known
world. Even Egyptian gods dwell there, as we know of Horus from Crete and
Amun from Punt. It is our task to pay attention to the context of both
essentialised and volatile understanding of Egyptianness and otherness.
Pronounced differences between Egyptians and some foreigners or similia-
rities with others could also reflect cosmology and politics (Kilani, 2015). In
fact, ancient Egyptians used the word rmṯ ʻhumanʼ to designate both them-
selves and foreigners, and ʻhumanityʼ was something both Egyptians and
foreigners could lose (Chantrain, 2019; Moers, 2005).
From around 2700 to 1650 BC, most of the ethnonyms we encounter in textual
sources are rather generic and are used by Egyptians themselves as umbrella
terms for various groups (Asiatics or Syro-Palestinians, Nubians, Libyans, and
inhabitants of the Eastern Desert). From around 1600 BC and later, there is
increased contact with more distant foreign lands and new ethnonyms appear in
Egyptian sources, some old ones changed meanings and new foreign groups are
attested in Egypt (e.g. Aegeans, various groups we label as Sea Peoples,
Hittites). Some of them, like Sea People Shardana men, fought both against
Egyptians and on their side since thirteenth to twelfth century BC, and eventually
stayed in Egypt where they married Egyptian women and were depicted as
Egyptian men worshiping Egyptian gods, the epithet Shardana being the only
indication of their foreign origin (Emanuel, 2013). One still finds those with
Asiatic or Nubian descent, sometimes keeping to their foreign origin, some-
times keeping only the name of their ancestors. For those people who seem to us
to be foreign only because of their name or the name of some of their ancestors,
we should be very careful in dismissing the possibility that they were seen as
less Egyptian than foreign by their contemporaries. If and in which contexts
their Egyptianness could be questioned is, according to the best of my know-
ledge, not known yet. Foreign ancestry can be invisible in documents if the
name is Egyptian and, as also suggested, could be omitted for reasons of
decorum, status, or profession (Mourad, 2017: 384). Sometimes although the
names were foreign, the titles of these ‘foreigners’ were Egyptian, as were their
burials and the rest of their dress (e.g in the tomb of three foreign wives of
Thutmose III from fifteenth century BC; Lilyquist, 2003). They do not seem to be
considered less Egyptian than other Egyptians and maybe this was so because of
their status.
This trend continues in the first two centuries of first millennium BC, when local
kings of Libyan descent and those kings coming from Kush ruled the country. In
those cases where we can recognise people of foreign origin, this is again because
of their names (Johnson, 1999: 212) or, in some cases, certain cultural elements
such as dress. G. Vittmann stresses that Libyan royal names, such as Osorkon,
Shoshenk, and Psammtich are attested even until the Ptolemaic period, from fourth
to first century BC (Vittmann, 2003: 19). Through status, some Nubians buried in
Egypt could have shared much more with some Egyptians than with some Nubians
in Nubia or the Egyptian Nile Valley (Budka, 2012: 52). It seems that in the first
millennium BC, foreigners were considered to be those who were real incomers,
bringing with them new ways of life, new languages, and names. Among these are
numerous foreign mercenaries (Carians, Ionians, Phoenicians, Judeans, various
Aramaic speaking groups) or representatives of foreign states governing Egypt for
their kings residing somewhere else (Persians). Some of these people certainly
stayed in Egypt and we know that they also adopted Egyptian names, titles, and at
least some Egyptian customs (Vittmann, 2003). Yet, the descendants of all those
people of foreign origin we know from previous periods lived next to these new
foreigners as locals. The Egyptian umbrella term ḫ3s.tjw ‘foreigners’ is never used
for peoples of foreign origin in an Egyptian sociocultural context. It was reserved
for foreigners outside of Egypt (Schneider, 2010: 144).
This process of negotiation of Egyptiannes and otherness would repeat again
under the Ptolemaic rule, from fourth to first century BC, when the main groups
attested in the sources were Egyptians and Greeks (considered to be those who
adhered to Hellenic culture). However, most people did not express their
identity in such a binary way, and stressed their Egyptianess or Greekness to
different extents depending on context (Winnicki, 1992). Greek art forms in
Egypt were not reserved for ‘Greeks’, nor were Egyptian forms reserved for
‘Egyptians’ (Riggs, 2005: 22). Fiscal and cleruchic policies of the Ptolemies
partially reshaped Egyptian society so that social status became preeminent and
ethnicity no longer mattered to the state already before the Roman annexation
(Fischer-Bovet, 2018). Again, we lose some of the groups from sight, such as
previously mentioned foreign mercenaries. Some of them could have expressed
their Egyptianness or Greekness more or even easier than others depending on
their descent or cultural background.
After the Roman conquest of Egypt, these divisions and understandings of
ethnic identity probably played far less a role than the status of citizen given by
the Roman state (Riggs, 2005: 18). Romans were considered to be all who had
legal status and rights of a Roman citizen, no matter the fact that they did not
necessarily come from Rome or Europe or anywhere from the vast empire.
J. Rowlandson has demonstrated that ethnic self-ascription is absent from
Roman period documents from Egypt and even the ethnic labelling of the others
is rare and not strictly ethnic (Rowlandson, 2013: 214). In the Roman period,
many of the terms we consider ethnic also gained a legal connotation, so that
Hellenes of the nome capital enjoyed the privilege of paying laographia (poll-
tax) at a reduced rate (Goudriaan, 1988: 119).
After this short overview of over 3 millennia of ethnogenesis in ancient
Egypt, the following sections will bring the reader closer to the problems of
investigating ethnicity in the Nile Valley.
2 From Race to Culture and People: Egyptology of the

Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
2.1 Egyptology and Scientific Racism
How early Egyptologists understood ancient Egyptians and their neighbours is
nicely illustrated by a depiction from the tomb of King Seti I (1323–1279 BC) in
the Valley of the Kings (Figure 1), which was discovered in 1817 by an Italian
explorer, G. Battista Belzoni (1778–1823). The painted decoration of the tomb
contains the depiction from the Book of the Gates (an ancient Egyptian funerary
text) of what was then and is often even now referred to as the ‘four races’
(Figure 2). The depiction in question represents an Egyptian, a Nubian, a Libyan
and a Syrian man using different colours for their skin according to the conven-
tions in ancient Egyptian art (Section 1). These actually correspond to directions
in the sky and are described in the accompanying text as ‘cattle of god Re’
(Quack, 2016: 291). They were interpreted by Egyptologists at the beginning of
the discipline as ‘four species: red, black, white and yellow’ (Nott & Gliddon,
1854: 84), or in its developed phase as an expression of ‘the universalist, super-
racial conception of the world’ (Bresciani, 1997: 225). This discovery fit well into
the world views of Western Europeans during Belzoni’s time. By then, the old
division of humans into five races (Caucasian, Mongolid, Malay, Negroid and
American), made by German physician, naturalist and anthropologist
J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), in 1779, was already considered to be scientific
fact (Gould, 1996: 402). Scientific racism mirrored the colonial world order with
its hierarchy of races in which the white race was considered to be at the top and
others races were judged and ordered by their degree of affiliation to it (Siapkas,
2014: 68). In order to prove this, early scholars turned to skeletal remains and the
representations of ancient Egyptians and foreigners in ancient Egyptian art.
Figure 2 The so-called ‘four races’ depiction from the Book of the Gates
in the tomb of Seti I as interpreted by J. C. Nott & G. R. Gliddon
(redrawn after Nott & Gliddon, 1854: 85, fig. 1)
2.1.1 Craniometry
The use of craniometry (or the measurement of skulls), to study the racial
background of ancient and modern populations was a standard practice of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century. American physician and natural scien-
tist S. G. Morton (1799–1851) argued that the ranking of races could be
established objectively by physical characteristics and brain size (Gould,
1996: 83). Morton acquired cranial material from Egypt with the help of his
friend, English-born American G. R. Gliddon (1809–57), who was an
Egyptologist and US consul for Cairo (Morton, 1844: 1). Morton divided
the skulls into Caucasian, Negroid and Negro, with the Caucasian group
including Pelasgic, Semitic and Egyptian skulls. He supposedly found the
highest cranial capacity in the Pelasgic type (understood as Greek forebears),
and the lowest in the Negro type. Morton never considered that differences in
cranial capacity could be related to other factors, particularly body size and
sexual dimorphism. S. J. Gould calculated the cranial capacity again and
showed that, in Morton’s sample, the male Negroid average is slightly
above the Caucasian male and the female Negroid average slightly lower
than the female Caucasian. Thus, differences in average cranial capacity
here record difference in stature due to sexual dimorphism, and not variations
in intelligence (Gould, 1996: 95).
Craniometry was also utilised by other, better-known Egyptologists.

G. A. Reisner (1867–1942), an American archaeologist of Egypt, Sudan and
Palestine, argued, based on craniometry, that the earliest population of Egypt
and Nubia was racially and culturally identical, at least until the Second
Cataract in Nubia (Reisner, 1910: 319; Reisner, 1923: 5). According to him,
at the beginning of the third millennium BC, people beyond the First Cataract
were less affected by cultural development in Egypt. This he explained with
‘increasing change in the racial character of the people. The negroid element
became more marked’ (Reisner, 1923: 6). This demonstrates the inherent racism
of Reisner, as, according to him, the increased presence of black people
impeded the population beyond the First Cataract to culturally develop follow-
ing the developments in Egypt.
English Egyptologist W. M. F. Petrie (1853–1942) collaborated with
F. Galton (1822–1911) and K. Pearson (1857–1936), pioneers of eugenics,
practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating
people with specific desirable hereditary traits. Much like Gliddon sent
crania to Morton, Petrie sent skeletal material from his excavations in
Egypt to the University College in London Anthropometric Laboratory
throughout his career (Challis, 2013; Challis, 2016). He also provided charts
with cranial capacity for different ʻracesʼ (Figure 3).
Early scholars considered that there were two races living in the area of
Thebes in Upper Egypt: Negroid and non-Negroid (Keith, 1906: 5). Petrie
argued that differences in size and variability of skulls at the site of Naqada in
Figure 3 Cranial measures of different races according to W. M. F. Petrie

(redrawn after Petrie & Quibell, 1896: LXXXIV)
Upper Egypt indicate the arrival of a dynastic race superior to the inhabitants of
the Nile Valley (Petrie & Quibell, 1896). According to British anthropologist
D. E. Derry (1874–1961), the ‘dynastic race’ which built the pyramids came
from the east (Derry, 1956: 81). He described it as: ‘a dominant race, perhaps
relatively few in numbers but greatly exceeding the original inhabitants in
intelligence; a race which brought into Egypt the knowledge of building in
stone, of sculpture, painting, reliefs, and above all writing; hence the enormous
jump from the primitive Predynastic Egyptian to the advanced civilization of
the Old Empire’ (Derry, 1956: 85). The same opinion was held by British
Egyptologist W. B. Emery (1902–1971) who distinguished between the
‘Brown’ or ‘Mediterranean race’, which was inhabiting Lower Nubia, and the
ʻNegroid raceʼ living further south. He considered Lower Nubia and Upper
Nubia to be distinct, both racially and culturally (Emery, 1965: 133–5). The idea
of ʻdynastic raceʼ is the culmination of racist and colonial attitudes as at that
time it was not imaginable that indigenous non-white populations could pro-
duce high culture.
2.1.2 The Hamitic Question
The concerns with racial differentiation in early archaeology of Egypt and

Nubia were reflections of political views (contra Binder, 2019: 110). This is
nicely demonstrated with the question of ‘whiteness’ of ancient Egyptians,
known as the Hamitic question.
In the Bible, Ham is the son of Noah and the father of Cush (Nubian),
Mizraim (Egyptian), Phut (Libyan) and Canaan. In the Old Testament, Ham is
not attested as black, but the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of Jewish oral
tradition from the sixth century AD, states that the sons of Ham were cursed by
being black, which led to the idea established in the Middle Ages and continuing
into eighteenth and nineteenth century, that black people were descendants of
Ham (Foster, 1974: 177).
For early scholars of ancient Egypt it was very important to prove that ancient
Egyptians belonged to the white race. Gliddon found it questionable that ancient
Egyptians were the offspring of Ham, although this was the prevailing opinion
of the time:
For, if these unhappy descendants of Ham were under a curse, how was it, if
Ham be the parent of the Egyptians, that these unfortunate people were the
most civilized of antiquity? how was it, that this accursed race enjoyed, for
2500 years, the fairest portion of the earth? how came it that these unhappy
people held the descendants of Shem in bondage, or in tribute, during 1000
years before Cambyse, B. C. 525? (Gliddon, 1843: 18)
For Gliddon, it was not imaginable that, as offspring of Ham, supposedly black
Egyptians were the most civilised ancient people, having the dominion of the best
part of the earth and even having Jews in bondage, according to the Biblical
narrative. He referred to the Egyptian word Kush (Upper Nubia) as a barbarian
country and a perverse race (Gliddon, 1843: 24), and added that ‘civilization . . .
could not spring from Negroes, or from Berbers, and NEVER DID’ (Gliddon,
1843: 58, original emphasis). Consequently, the builders of the ‘Ethiopian pyra-
mids’ (Meroitic pyramids in Sudan) were, according to Gliddon, a race foreign to
Africa, namely white Caucasians (Gliddon, 1843: 59).
Particularly informative on racial prejudices of the time is Reisner’s descrip-
tion of Lower Nubia during the first half of second millennium BC:
I take my picture of the time largely from Lower Nubia as it is to-day, living
its isolated, primitive agricultural life in political security, relying for its few
luxuries on the sale of dates, goats, and basket-work, and on its income from
servitors in the employment of Europeans. The population is now,
I imagine, much the same in numbers, and much the same in culture, as it
was then. The largest centres of population had then, as now, a few Egyptian
officials, bullying the local inhabitants and cursing their place of exile . . .
The imported objects were largely Egyptian-simple tools of copper, small
alabaster vessels, wheel-made pots, blue-glazed beads and amulets, and
perhaps certain kind of cloth; just as now one finds a few Egyptian pots,
some European fabrics, petroleum tins, an occasional sewing-machine,
porcelain vessels, and silver-plated spoons, the latter usually bearing the
private marks of Cairo hotels! But the local culture, which has produced
none of these things and is incapable of producing or even of fully utilising
them, still remains practically late Neolithic in its conditions of life. I take it
that a race which cannot produce or even fully utilise the products of
a higher culture must, from an historical point of view, still be counted in
its former state. The evidences of the fortuitous possession of the products
of a higher culture only deepen the impression of cultural incompetence.
(Reisner, 1923: 7)
This quote indicates that direct parallels between the colonialism of his time
and ancient Egyptian domination in Nubia were not considered to be problem-
atic for Reisner and his contemporaries. In fact, their experiences were their key
to understanding the past because they considered that the population under
foreign domination did not change, whether the colonisers were Egyptian or
British.
J. H. Breasted (1865–1935), father of American Egyptology and founder of
the Oriental Institute in Chicago, also shared the same racial ideas about
mankind (Figure 4): ‘If we look outside of the Great Northwest Quadrant, we
find in the neighboring territory only two other clearly distinguished races – the
Figure 4 Distribution of different races in Europe and North

Africa according to J. H. Breasted
(redrawn after Breasted, 1935: 130; graphic A. Hassler, ÖAI/ÖAW)
Mongoloids on the east and the Negroes on the south. These peoples occupy an
important place in the modern world, but they played no part in the rise of
civilisation’ (Breasted, 1935: 131).
Again we see that the reason behind insisting that ancient Egyptians belonged
to the white race was the belief that other races cannot produce civilisations.
Austrian Egyptologist H. Junker (1877–1962) was a strong advocate of the
idea that Africa was inhabited by Hamites (white race in Junker’s work) and
Negroes. According to him, the Negroes were dominated by a ʻwhiteʼ Hamitic
superstratum (Matić, 2018a: 31). Junker disagreed with Reisner on the origin of
Kerma culture in Nubia. He argued that its bearers were native Nubians,
a highly developed African culture of the second millennium BC. According to
Junker, Kerma was the only African high culture from the pre-Christian period
which does not consciously lean on Egypt, like the Meroitic culture. The reason
being that Junker considered that all cultures of the Nile Valley were produced
by light-skinned Hamites and not dark-skinned Negroes (Matić, 2018a: 31).

Where Reisner did not see Kerma as an indigenous Nubian culture because he
interpreted Nubians as being racially different to Egyptians, Junker interpreted
Kerma as an indigenous culture because he considered it to be Hamitic, which
for him meant being white (Matić, 2018a: 39). Following the ideas of previous
scholars such as Breasted and Junker, Emery also argued that the people of Kush
were not ‘Negroes, as we understand the term applied to this racial group
today’. Instead he claimed that ‘The Egyptians used the term “Negro” to
designate all the dark-skinned peoples of the south, whatever their race’
(Emery, 1965: 158). In this, he refers to the Egyptian term Nḥs.y, a generic
term for southerners including both Egyptians and Nubians in Upper Egypt and
Nubians south of the First Cataract.
Contrary to the ideas of these early scholars, anthropological research in
the last few decades has demonstrated the similarity in morphometrical
features between early third millennium BC Egyptians from Abydos and the
population of Kerma in Upper Nubia. Studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest
that modern Egyptians and Nubians are much more similar to one another
than either is to the population of South Sudan (Williams, Belcher &
Armelagos, 2005: 341). Whether or not ancient or modern Egyptians can
be considered black depends on modern definitions of blackness. From
a modern Egyptian frame of reference, far fewer ancient Egyptians would
be categorised as black (Roth, 1998: 223). As we have seen in the case of
M. Hefny (Section 1), even these frames of reference can change in another
social context.
2.1.3 Scientific Racism and Ancient Egyptian Depictions of Foreigners
Authors such as Morton and Gliddon approached ancient Egyptian iconography as

photographic verity (Kemp, 2018: 25). Morton compared Egyptian representations
of women in fifteenth to eleventh century BC Theban tombs in Egypt to Nubian girls
of his time (Morton, 1844: 24), and argued that Negroes were numerous in ancient
Egypt, but that their social position was the same as in his time, that of servants and
slaves (Morton, 1844: 66). Morton’s ideas were welcomed in the American south
where they were used to justify slavery (Gould, 1996: 101).
Nott and Gliddon even wrote:
The monuments of Egypt prove, that Negro races have not, during 4000 years
at least, been able to make one solitary step, in Negro-land, from their savage
state; the modern experience of the United States and the West Indies
confirms the teachings of monuments and of history; and our remarks on
Crania, hereinafter, seem to render fugacious all probability of a brighter
future for these organically-inferior types, however sad the thought may be.
(Nott & Gliddon, 1854: 95–6)
Comparing Egyptian representations of captive Nubians from New Kingdom

monuments, they argued that they obtained proof that ‘the Negro has remained
unchanged in Africa, above Egypt, for 8,000 years; coupled with the fact that
the same type, during some eight or ten generations of sojourn in the United
States, is still preserved, despite of transplantation’ (Nott & Gliddon, 1854:
249–50).
Petrie also used ancient Egyptian iconography for racial distinctions (Petrie,
1901: 250–4) and collected photographs of ancient Egyptian depictions of
foreigners and organised them into racial groups (Petrie, 1887).
The distinctions between populations based on skin colour as depicted in
ancient Egyptian art, a method going back to Morton, Gliddon, Nott and Petrie,
are found also in later works. Thus, for American archaeologist B. Trigger
(1937–2006), a difference in colour is an indication of the origin and conse-
quently the status of depicted figures (Figure 5): ‘The plantation scene in the
tomb of the Nubian prince Djehutyhotep suggests that he may have been
producing dates for export to Egypt. It is also possible that the distinction
between black and brown skinned workmen in this scene is between Lower
Nubians who worked as serfs on his estates and Negro slaves who came from
farther south’ (Trigger, 1976: 130).
Figure 5 Plantation scene from the tomb of Djehutyhotep, Debeira-East in

Lower Nubia, reign of Hathspesut and Thutmose III, fifteenth century BC
(digitally retouched after Säve-Söderbergh, 1987)
This quote nicely demonstrates that, although the term race is not used, the
method of analysing depictions of Egyptians and foreigners in ancient Egyptian
art remains the same as the one embedded in the racial approach. Differences in
skin colour, namely brown or black, are taken as indicative of exact geograph-
ical origin and even status of the Nubians in question. The more black, the less
free. The fallacy of this logic is demonstrated by numerous cases where Nubians
depicted in both colours are described in the accompanying text as coming from
the same region, indicating that the difference in colour is used as an optical
effect. For example, Nubians depicted in the tomb of an Egyptian viceroy
named Huy (Figure 11), which will be discussed further in Section 3, are
depicted in both colours, although in the upper most register of the scene the
text states that they come from Lower Nubia, and in the two lower registers the
text states that they come from Upper Nubia. The optical effect is used in order
to avoid visual blending of figures of the same colour; that is why black and
brown figures alternate.
That ideas inherited from early Egyptology can find their way even into later
scholarship is nicely illustrated also in a passage written by American
Egyptologist D. B. Redford (1934–): ‘One should never underestimate the
overwhelming and irresistible attraction of the way of life of the triumphant
imperial culture, whether Egyptian, Hellenic, Roman, or British. Something
more than a grudging admiration had overcome Nubian chiefs such as
Heḳa-nefer or Ruya: they had “realised” that to be Egyptian mean to be an
Übermensch’ (Redford, 2004: 10).
Much is revealed by this statement. Egypt, Greece, Rome and Britain are
described as imperial cultures. Britain is placed at the end of a line of consecu-
tive empires. Nubian chiefs are said to have realised that being Egyptian means
to be Übermensch, a concept from the philosophy of F. Nietzsche who, in his
book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), refers to Übermensch as a goal which
humanity is to set for itself. The context of Redford’s sentence, and its structure,
indicate that he understands Übermensch as something superior. This idea of
Übermensch standing for a superior human was actually advocated by the Nazi
regime, and such an understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy was used as the
foundation for National Socialist ideas. Far from arguing that Redford’s passage
has a national socialist agenda, my point here is that one has to be more critical
towards the terms used to describe certain phenomena. By utilising the concept
of Übermensch to argue for the view of superiority of the Egyptians in the eyes
of the Nubians, Redford may be unwillingly making associations to concepts
and ideas tied to the racial superiority of one at the expense of other (Matić,
2018a: 37). Instead of claiming that Nubians, Hekanefer and Ruya realised that
to be an Egyptian meant to be an Übermensch, we should consider that they
probably aspired not to be just any Egyptian, but to be a high-status state official
of Egypt. These are two considerably different things (Section 3).
One might find it incredible, but even the British Museum Dictionary of
Ancient Egypt has an entry on race in which the authors state: ‘[the] apparently
simple question of the racial origins or characteristic racial type of the Egyptians
is both difficult to answer and in some measure irrelevant’ (Shaw & Nicholson,
1995: 239). Irrelevant or not, the authors use the category of race as valid and
further argue that ‘examination of human remains from the Predynastic period
shows a mixture of racial types, including negroid, Mediterranean and
European, and by the time that Pharaonic civilization had fully emerged it
was no longer meaningful to look for a particular Egyptian racial type, since
they were clearly already, to some extent at least, a mixed population’ (Shaw &
Nicholson, 1995: 239).
What we can notice from this entry is not only that the category of race can
find its way into a broadly distributed dictionary published by one of the most
authoritative institutions in the field, but that the understanding of race does not
substantially differ from that of the nineteenth century. The entry from the
British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt is unfortunately not an isolated
example. I. Shaw writes in his chapter on ancient Egypt and the outside world in
the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, that anthropological studies suggest that
the predynastic population of Egypt included ‘a mixture of racial types
(negroid, Mediterreanean and European)’ (Shaw, 2000: 309). In her discussion
on the connection between Punt and Harapan India, D. Michaux-Colombot
even wrote that the ruler of Punt depicted in the temple of Hatshepsut in Deir el-
Bahari (Figure 6) has Caucasian features understood as ‘blond or flaxen haired’
and being more in line with an ‘Aryan immigrant in Pakistan than with
a Sudanese’ (Michaux-Colombot, 2004: 358). Problems with historical accur-
acy aside, a more urgent problem is the racial discourse involved and left
unquestioned.
2.2 Egyptology, Culture-Historical Archaeology and Ethnic Identity

The increase in collected and excavated archaeological material in Europe, and
a growing focus on its geographical distribution caused by nineteenth-century
nationalist interest, slowly paved the way for a new archaeological paradigm –
traditional or culture-historical archaeology (Trigger, 2008: 215).
Archaeologists started to group together classes of objects, burials, dwellings,
settlement organisations etc., among which they found similar traits. These
were placed on distribution maps allowing for distinct archaeological groups
or cultures to be defined (Lucy, 2005: 86). The old term race was slowly but
Figure 6 King and Queen of Punt, mortuary temple of Hatshepsut

in Deir el-Bahari, relief block from Egyptian Museum in Cairo
(photo, courtesy of Filip Taterka)
surely replaced with other terms such as people or ethnic group, but without any
conceptual redefinition (Jones, 1997: 16; Saini, 2019: 95; Siapkas 2014: 69).
There remained the concern with holism, homogeneity, order and boundedness
(Jones, 1997: 48). Archaeologists working in Egypt and the Sudan at the end of
the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century predominantly had
Western and Central European and American academic backgrounds. It is
therefore not surprising that many of the ideas found in Western European
and American archaeology of the time found their way into colonial archae-
ology in Egypt and Sudan. The following examples serve to illustrate this point.
Most of Petrie and Reisner’s racial assumptions coloured their interpretation
of the material culture. Petrie considered the Naqada culture with its core in
Upper Egypt to be the product of the ʻdynastic raceʼ. Reisner coined the terms
A, B and C-group for archaeological cultures of fourth and third millennium BC
in Lower Nubia. The idea being that subsequent cultural groups follow one after
the other and that development phases can be distinguished within each (e.g.
ancient, classic and final A-group). Similarly, in Kerma in Upper Nubia another
archaeological culture was defined and named after this site, also by Reisner.
Another Nubian archaeological culture was recognised by Petrie in cemetery

X at Hu (Diaspolis Parva) in Upper Egypt in 1899 and named Pan-Grave culture
after very shallow (sometimes less than 40 cm deep) circular pan-shaped
graves, which later turned out to be a minority (de Souza, 2013: 109–10;
Liszka, 2015: 43). In fact, the first example identified by Petrie as a Pan-
Grave burial (Abadiyeh, grave E2) had grave contents distinctive for Kerma
culture (de Souza, 2019: 7). M. Bietak argued that the Pan-Grave skeletons
belonged to a ʻNegroid raceʼ and the C-group skeletons to a ʻEuropoid raceʼ.
Because of these racial differences, he assumed that the C-group people were
indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley whereas Pan-Grave people had to
come from elsewhere, and he suggested the Eastern Desert of Sudan (Bietak,
1966: 61–88). Thus, focus on race of the skeletons as the way to pinpoint their
origin and movements went hand in hand with the culture-historical ʻpots equal
peopleʼ premise. Unfortunately, these race-centred interpretations are not
reflected on even in the most recent study on Pan-Grave pottery (de Souza,
2019: 8). According to K. Lizka and D. Raue, these terms today cause more
problems than solutions (Liszka, 2015: 49; Raue, 2019a: 293).
Culture-historical archaeologies often turn to those societies which have left
written records in order to ethnically interpret those which did not. Culture-
historical archaeologists search through the written sources for groups argued to
have inhabited certain territories. In the next step they interpret archaeological
cultures of these territories as material remains of groups they searched for in
the written sources (Sherratt, 2005: 26). However, we cannot know whether
historically documented ethnonyms were already being used in periods before
they are attested in texts, nor if they had any value for those they are supposed to
be naming (Chrisomalis & Trigger, 2003: 14). Continuity in name does not
necessarily correspond to continuity in cultural practices and identities (Cruz,
2011: 337–40). Yet, Egyptologists more often than not seem to make such
assumptions, as though ethnic identity was being simply inherited. We are
warned about the fallacies of such assumptions from studies of more recent
contexts, as, for example, what it meant to be Shona, BaKongo or Igba in Africa
in the seventeenth century is not the same as today (Cruz, 2011: 352). The name
of an ethnic group may stay the same, but the experience of being a member of
this group may change; but also, the experience may stay relatively stable while
the name can change (Jenkins, 2008: 171).
There are numerous examples for this from ancient Egypt. Here I would like
to discuss three cases: 1. Mḏ3.yw – where an ethnonym from ancient Egyptian
sources was used to label an archaeological culture which appears later and
disappears earlier than the ethnonym; 2. Libyans – where similarity in ethno-
nyms is used to trace ethnicity backwards and label an entire region and its
diverse population; and 3. Hyksos – where a term for the ruling class is used
erroneously as an ethnonym to label an archaeological culture and the entire
population of the Eastern Delta.
1. The ancient Egyptian term Mḏ3.yw (inhabitants of land or region Mḏ3 in

the Eastern Desert) is often used for the population which produced and used the
Pan-Grave culture (Baines, 1996: 376; Bietak, 1966: 61–78; Bietak, 2018: 74;
Kemp, 2018: 40; Säve-Söderbergh, 1941: 138–40; Schneider, 2003: 82). The
equation was first suggested by A. Weigall, a student of Petrie, in 1907 and later
found in the works of T. Säve-Söderbergh, M. Bietak and others, rarely ques-
tioned even today. The argument used by a Weigall is a classic example of
culture-historical ʻpots equal peopleʼ premise. He based his equation on the
Pan-Grave pottery found at the base of the ledge of the family shrine from
fourteenth century BC at Gebel Agg in Lower Nubia where a man named Humay
is depicted and has a title ʻMḏ3.y of His Majestyʼ (Liszka, 2015: 43–5).
Evidence for one group is then used to write historical narratives about the
other (for criticism, see Liszka, 2015: 42). K. Liszka has shown that there are no
solid arguments for interpreting Mḏ3.yw and bearers of Pan-Grave culture
solely as mercenaries, as often assumed, and that there is no Pan-Grave presence
in the Eastern Desert, considered to be the land where Mḏ3.yw lived. She
suggests that Pan-Grave culture should rather be associated with the Nile
Valley (Liszka, 2015: 42; see also de Souza, 2013: 109).
An additional problem is that a continuity in identity is silently argued
through identification of modern Bedja with ancient Blemmies and ancient
Egyptian Mḏ3.yw (Zibelius-Chen, 2007: 391). Although most authors argue that
from the sixteenth century BC onwards, Mḏ3.yw did not signify an ethnic group but
rather an occupation, D. Michaux-Colombot has been a vocal opponent of this
idea, demonstrating the continuity of the use of the word Mḏ3.yw even until
Ptolemy III (284–222 BC), as Demotic Papyrus Lille 3, No. 99 mentions an entire
village of the Mḏ3.yw in the Fayum with men, women and children among them
(Michaux-Colombot, 1994: 29). She even identifies the Meluhha from Akkadian
cuneiform documents with the Mḏ3.yw (Michaux-Colombot, 1994: 32; Michaux-
Colombot, 2010). C. Rilly argues that Mḏ3.yw are mentioned as enemies of Kush
in late Napatan texts (fourth century BC) and probably also referred to in Meroitic
texts (third century BC), and that Pliny the Elder in first century AD calls them Midoe
or Midioe (Rilly, 2019: 132–3). The problem is that, in such identifications and
arguments of ethnic continuity, the fact that none of these ethnonyms were
explicitly used by the people or groups they are used to refer to by others (such
as Egyptian, Greek or Roman authors) is not taken into account. Continuity in
language is not the same as continuity in self-definition and ethnic identity.
A. Obłuski warned that, in the fifth century AD, the ethnonym Blemmyes was used
to designate the population living in the Nile Valley which was ethnically not
Blemmyan and therefore that the authors have erroneously attributed some elem-
ents of material culture to them (Obłuski, 2013).
The designation Mḏ3.yw could have changed meaning over several millen-
nia. Authors advocating a Mḏ3.yw = Pan-Grave culture equation fail to explain
the continuity of the term and discontinuity in the archaeological culture it
supposedly referred to. Even in a recent study of the Pan-Grave pottery, it is
suggested that the search for cultural connections may be extended both geo-
graphically, namely to C-group, Kerma culture, Jebel Mokram and Jebel Moya
traditions, and chronologically, back to A-group and forward to Blemmyes and
Beja tribes. Which cultural connections are supposed to be sought is not
specified and terms such as ʻgroupʼ, ʻcultureʼ and ʻtraditionʼ are changed with
a term ʻhorizonʼ which designates regional variants of the Pan-Grave culture (de
Souza, 2019: 152). The underlying premise of culture-historical archaeology
remains. Quite a complex term culture is reduced to techniques in manufacture
and decoration of pottery.
2. The same tracing of ethnicity backwards using an ethnonym is also found in

the case of the Libyans. Phonetic similarities between the Egyptian word Rbw and
Greek word Libues, the first being attested for the first time in thirteenth
century BC Egypt and the second not predating the first millennium BC, are used
to argue in favour of ethnic continuity (for criticism, see Cooney, 2011: 43). The
term Libyan is a convention in Egyptology which actually denotes all non-
Egyptians who lived in the region to the west of the Nile Valley and Delta
(Snape, 2003: 94). Even in some recent studies, there seems to be no critical
reflection on this matter. Rather, even the exalted position of women in Egypt
during the rule of a Libyan dynasty at the beginning of first millennium BC is
interpreted as possible Libyan influence. Evidence for this is sought both in the
fifth century BC writings of Herodotus who reports on Libyan women going to war
and riding chariots, or in the status of women among the Tuareg. The testimony of
Herodotus is then used to interpret the information that, at the beginning of
eleventh century BC, the mother of Payankh, high priest of Amun of Libyan
descent, accompanied him on a campaign and assumed responsibility for many
administrative duties (Becker, 2016: 39). The difference between Libyans of the
thirteenth century BC, Libyans of first millennium BC, and Libyans described by
Herodotus in fifth century BC and Tuareg are blurred simply because they all
inhabited or inhabit regions west of Egypt we call Libya.
3. An archaeological culture which has received increased scholarly attention

in the recent years is related to the Hyksos kingdom in the Eastern Delta from
c.1650–1550 BC. Hyksos is a Greek term used by the first-century AD Jewish

historian Josephus who recorded fragments of the writing of an Egyptian priest
Manetho from early third century BC, which describe the conquerors from the
east who invaded Egypt. The word Hyksos derives from Egyptian term ḥḳ3 ḥ3s.wt
meaning ‘ruler of hill-desert (foreign) lands’. Therefore, in the Egyptian language,
it did not refer to an ethnic group, but was a title. In fact, ancient Egyptians
themselves did not use this term for the rulers of foreign origin in the Eastern
Delta, instead these rulers adopted the title themselves (Candelora, 2018: 47). Most
Hyksos rulers had foreign names with northwest Semitic parallels possibly indicat-
ing a northwest Semitic origin (Schneider, 1998: 34, 150), but some of them
like Khayan had both foreign and Egyptian names, and some like Apepi only
Egyptian names. We should also bear in mind that not all Hyksos kings were
outsiders although being of foreign origin. Some of them were born in Egypt
(Roberts, 2013: 287). The scholarly consensus today is that these rulers of foreign
origin used the opportunity provided by the weakened state and took control of the
Eastern Delta.
Still, early scholars used the term Hyksos as a word for a race which sup-
posedly invaded Egypt (Candelora, 2018) and, after increased excavations in the
Eastern Delta, specifically at the site of Tell el-Dabca (Avaris, ancient capital of
the Hyksos) a specific archaeological culture was defined and slowly but surely
the population which produced it was labelled Hyksos by Egyptologists (e.g.
Bresciani, 1997: 234; Mourad, 2015; Redmount, 1995). In the Eastern Delta of
that time, Syro-Palestinian burial customs, such as burying the dead within the
settlement, burying an equid together with the deceased dignitary, and body of the
deceased laid on the back with legs flexed, are found together with Egyptian
burial customs (Bietak, 1996: 10–25; also Bader, 2011; Bader, 2013). New
pottery style also developed in the region at the beginning of the Hyksos period
(Bietak, Forstner-Müller & Mlinar, 2001: 172). This led to referring to the entire
region as a kingdom ruled by and populated mostly by foreigners. Even in
contemporary archaeology of Egypt, one may often find the adjective Hyksos
to label a grave, cemetery, house, or settlement. In the process, a designation for
a ruling class is transferred first onto all newcomers and then to the entire
population of the eastern Delta (e.g. Haring, 2005: 171). Furthermore, depictions
of ʻAsiaticsʼ in ancient Egyptian art are used as source of information for the
ethnic features of the Hyksos (for criticism, see Cohen, 2015: 26). The past reality
was, of course, much more complex (Bader, 2013). The population which
inhabited this kingdom was surely diverse. However, Theban kings who con-
trolled Upper Egypt in the south refer to their enemies in the north as Asiatics, no
matter the diverse population of the region. They even depict these northern
enemies of diverse origins as one unified group of foreigners in representations of
the conflict, as evidenced by the depiction of the final war between king Ahmose
from Thebes and the Hyksos kingdom in his Abydos temple from sixteenth
century BC (Harvey, 1998). The problem emerges when Egyptologists confuse
ancient Theban ideology with reality of the time (for criticism of this, see Polz,
1998) and consequently start seeing it in the archaeological record.
2.3 A Hidden Theory

Theory is, for example, in German archaeological publications, rarely found
as a separate chapter or heading at the beginning of a paper or a monograph. It
is more often than not implicit, or written between the lines (Rebay-Salisbury,
2011: 41–2). This implicit theoretical background shows itself only through
interpretations and that is why it was termed ‘hidden theory’ by U. Sommer
and A. Gramsch (2011: 25). However, this is not limited to German archae-
ology. Typical of the working of culture-historical reasoning as hidden theory
is the use of archaeological cultures as a quasi ideology freely substitutes for
ethnic groups without questioning the assumption that these correlate (Curta,
2014: 2510). Supposed pre-theoretical description of empirical evidence is
nevertheless rooted in culture-historical reasoning which identifies ethnic
identity behind it (Jones, 1997: 29). Several cases from Egyptology nicely
illustrate this.
One of the typical cases of a culture-historical approach to material culture
and ethnic identity is found in the interpretation of one cemetery from previ-
ously mentioned site Tell el-Dabca. Some short time after the period of Hyksos
rule in the place of an earlier palace, a cemetery was found in areas north of
village cEzbet Helmi. According to M. Bietak, the archaeological phase to
which the cemetery belonged dates to the mid sixteenth century BC. However,
this date of the stratum has been questioned (Höflmayer, 2018; Matić, 2018b).
Judging by the published plan drawing, the cemetery contains twenty-eight
graves, some of which involving multiple burials of individuals of varying age,
among whom are also children (Figure 7).
According to both the drawings and the reports, the burials did not contain
any grave goods. Yet, they were interpreted as burials of Nubian soldiers (e.g.
Bietak, Dorner & Jánosi, 2001; for further references Matić, 2014a; Matić,
2018b), and this interpretation has rarely been questioned (Matić, 2014a). The
arguments for this interpretation may be summarised as follows: some of the
crania have Negroid elements and are therefore interpreted as Nubian; and
handmade pottery of Nubian culture was found in other areas in Tell el-Dabca,
however not in these burials. A handful of supposedly Nubian silex arrowheads
was found in area H/I of cEzbet Helmi, however not in these burials, and are
Figure 7 Plan of the cemetery in area cEzbet Helmi, Tell el-Dabca

(©ÖAI/ÖAW, redrawn after Bietak, Dorner & Jánosi, 2001: 70)
actually from a higher and thus unrelated archaeological layer. Finally, Theban
king Ahmose of mid sixteenth century BC had a military campaign in Nubia from
which he could have brought soldiers when he embarked against the Hyksos in
the north (for details see Matić, 2014a; Matić, 2018b). The problem with the last
argument is that it is based on the text of the autobiography of Ahmose son of
Ebana, who was a soldier in service of Ahmose. He actually states in the
autobiography that the campaign in Nubia occurred after the campaign against
Avaris (Matić, 2014a). In the same cemetery, two supposedly non-funerary pits
were also found with skeletal remains of individuals who were interpreted as
Nubian using the same arguments as those for the interpretation of the rest of the
cemetery population (Matić, 2018b).
What we are observing in the example of the Tell el-Dabca cemetery and
execration pits, is the combination of several key points discussed in this
section, namely, pottery as remains of a specific ethnic group and skulls as
keys for racial identification, and therefore also ethnic attribution of skeletal
remains. These arguments are quintessential features of culture-historical rea-
soning in archaeology.
That culture-historical assumptions on the equation material culture=people
can be combined with other problematic assumptions such as the quality of
production as a reflection of ethnicity is clear from C. Hubschmann’s search for
the Libyans in the archaeological record. The simple argument behind this
search can be summarised as follows. Libyans are depicted bringing ostrich
eggs and feathers in Egyptian fifteenth to eleventh century BC art and wearing
ostrich feathers on their heads, therefore the presence of undecorated ostrich
eggshell fragments found in all levels of occupation at Bates’ Island should
suggest Libyan presence. The same was argued for the fort at Zawiyet Umm el-
Rakham, where additional features have been interpreted as Libyan. Namely,
several circular stone structures within the fort lack plaster and grey/black
coarse ware pottery and sherds made of local fabric with shell inclusions were
found on the floor level around the circular structures (Hubschmann, 2010:
176–7). The author writes that the crude manner of the construction of these
structures ‘makes it doubtful that they were manufactured by Egyptians or used
for trade; they were most likely made by local inhabitants for utilitarian
purposes’ (Hubschmann, 2010: 178). It is assumed that Egyptians do not
construct or use crude structures for utilitarian purposes. However, it seems
that both Egyptians and Libyans inhabited the fortress of Zawiyet Umm el-
Rakham and cooperated with each other (Snape, 2003: 103–4). In such
a context, people of different origins and identities could have used material
culture from different traditions, and therefore a search for clear divisions is
blurring the reality of daily life at the site.
Sometimes different cultural elements can be found in the same context,
demonstrating the limits of premises of culture-historical archaeology. For
example, M. R. Buzon argues that four burials from Tombos were identified
as Nubian based on both Nubian burial ritual (flexed position on the side) and
because a Nubian bowl was found at the head of two women ‘providing
additional evidence of Nubian ethnicity’ (Buzon, 2006: 688; Buzon, 2008:
173). However, apart from these bowls, the grave goods associated with all
four burials were otherwise Egyptian (Smith, 2007: 237). Flexed position in
burials sometimes associated with funerary beds and Nubian pottery appears in
New Kingdom tombs at Aniba, Tombos and Soleb (Spencer, Stevens & Binder,
2017: 45). This makes one wonder whether the flexed position of these individ-
uals is more an expression of specific funerary customs. When the burials
contain material culture of both Egyptian and Nubian provenance how do we
discern which of these had more value or meaning in defining identity? Were
these Nubian women buried with Egyptian grave goods, or women of Nubian
descent, but aspiring to Egyptian identity while being buried according to
Nubian funerary beliefs? Are the terms Egyptian and Nubian adequate here?
Culture-historical understanding of material culture and identity also fails in
addressing the dynamic processes behind static archaeological record. For
example, M. Bietak has recently attempted to identify separate Egyptian and
Asiatic communities in Tell el-Dabca at cEzbet Rushdi III, where an adminis-
trative quarter of the town dating to eighteenth to seventeenth century BC was
found (Figure 8). Namely, in the excavated area, large houses with courtyards
were found and two long north-south oriented streets divide at least three
quarters. The one in the very west was interpreted as administrative, because
of the numerous seal impressions found there, whereas those in the east as
domestic, because of significantly lower numbers of these seal impressions.
Figure 8 Plan of the settlement in area cEzbet Rushdi III, Tell el-Dabca
(©ÖAI/ÖAW, courtesy of I. Forstner-Müller)
Bietak noticed that toggle pins were also found in the eastern quarters and that
intramural burials are largely lacking at the site, being present in a small number
in the two eastern blocks. Arguing that the Hyksos employed Egyptians in their
administration and that toggle pins and intramural burials are an ‘Asiatic’ ethnic
marker in Egyptological sence, he postulated that Egyptians lived in the western
administrative quarter and Asiatics or Egyptianised Asiatics in the two eastern
quarters. Consequently, he rejects the interpretation of the western quarter as
administrative, because of the lack of systematically constructed units (Bietak,
2016: 270).
The problem with Bietakʼs interpretation is that there are hardly any original
floors and the finds could therefore belong to the previous building phase, which
Bietak has indeed acknowledged. However, for him this does not pose
a problem, because this would not change the conclusion based on distribution
patterns, as he argues that previous phases led to the final settlement situation
(Bietak, 2016: 270). He does not take into account the temporal component, for
when we consider the number of the pins, and the fact that they could have also
been distributed chronologically as well as spatially, the overall distribution
map changes considerably. The area was settled throughout eighteenth and
seventeenth and re-used in the late sixteenth century BC. Therefore, if there
were only one to several pins in one chronological phase of the site Bietak
would probably not draw the same conclusion. Toggle pins are also known in
Egypt from Tell el-Maskhuta, Tell el-Yehudiyeh, Tell Heboua, Kom Rabia, and
Gurob, sites concentrated in Eastern Delta or adjacent Lower Egyptian regions.
While some view these as good indicators of Canaanite presence (Sparks, 2004:
34), their distribution in Egypt could also indicate specific north Egyptian
openness to dress elements of Canaanite origin. Culture-historical archaeology
functioning as hidden theory silently assumes that the explanation can only be
sought in terms of ethnicity. The possibility of a distinct taste or habitus is not
taken into consideration. The next section demonstrates the complexity behind
material expressions of ethnic identity.
3 Ethnic Identity: Recent Perspectives in Egyptology

Processual archaeologists during the 1960–70s challenged culture-historical
understanding of material culture. They insisted on logical positivism, formation
and testing of hypothesis, building models, and turning to anthropology and hard
science in the epistemological background of their research. Culture was under-
stood as a specific extra-somatic adaptive mechanism. Ethnicity was not on the
agenda and culture-historical archaeology, which almost exclusively focused on
this, was considered to be an outmoded archaeological paradigm (Jones, 1997: 5;
Lucy, 2005: 91; Roberts & Vander Linden, 2011: 1). In the process, questions of
identity in the past were largely neglected and although attention was given to
different research questions, archaeological cultures were still used.
The growing insistence of postprocessual archaeologists in the 1980s and
1990s on the meanings of things, has led to arguing that material culture does
not simply passively reflect ethnic identity, but is an active element in its
negotiation (Curta, 2014: 2509; Lucy, 2005: 102; Voss, 2008: 12). Social groups
are not the same as things (Jenkins, 2008: 169). Material culture is what we have
left of them and it is not the same as representatives of an ethnic group
interviewed by ethnographers (Normark, 2004: 111–12). Some ethnic iden-
tities, like that of the Banda in Ghana, are based on intangible cultural practices
that do not leave imprints on the archaeological record (Cruz, 2011: 345). As
early as the 1980s, it has been demonstrated that there is no one-to-one correl-
ation between a stylistic group (equivalent to archaeological culture) and an
ethnic group (Hodder, 1982). If and which forms of material culture can be used
to express any kind of identity is not something we can assume before analysis.
For example, as we have seen in the previous section, pottery is more often than
not used to define archaeological cultures which are then interpreted as material
remains of ethnic groups, but there are enough examples showing that in some
societies this is not the case. Thus, ceramics produced in the Banda area of west-
central Ghana during the nineteenth and twentieth century lack ethnic connota-
tions (Cruz, 2011).
In the last several decades, diverse approaches to ethnic identity and ethnicity
appeared in sociology, anthropology, and consequently archaeology. I will
shortly discuss these current approaches providing illustrative case studies on
ancient Egypt to better explain them.
3.1 Primordial Approach

The understanding of ethnic identity as primordial gives group members a deep-
rooted psychological sense of identity. Ethnicity is, in this approach, something
deeply embedded, immutable, and prior to all other social relations. This
approach argues that primordial bonds between individuals result from the givens
of birth, such as blood, language, religion, territory, and culture, which can be
distinguished from other social ties on the basis of the importance of the tie itself
(Jones, 1997: 65). In a way, a primordial understanding of ethnicity reiterates the
essentialism of racial theories because, according to this approach, ethnicity is
biologically hereditary, as ethnic identity is based on attachments acquired at birth
(Section 2). The focus of primordialists was to define the cultural repertoire of an
ethnic group (Siapkas, 2014: 66–8). However, human groups cannot be reduced
to folkloric repositories of distinctive values and cultural attributes (Moreno

García, 2018: 2). A further problem with this approach is that it argues that
cultural traits which form ethnic groups are fixed and involuntarily (Jones, 1997:
69). We have seen that these have often changed in ancient Egyptian history
(Section 1). This approach is therefore very close to culture-historical archae-
ology and, as we have seen in Section 2, it is the most commonly encountered
understanding of ethnic identity utilised in interpretations of ancient Egypt.
3.2 Instrumentalist Approach

The instrumentalist approach conceptualises ethnicity as a sociopolitical
vehicle mobilised in certain situations in order to maximise the interests of an
individual or a group (Siapkas, 2014: 70). Instrumentalists see ethnic identity as
dynamic and situational, embedded in the organisation of social behaviour and
the institutional fabric of society (Jones, 1997: 72). Such an understanding of
ethnic identity gives group members motivation towards a certain end, linked to
existence and continuity, so that they can change their ethnic identity for
beneficial reasons (Normark, 2004: 133).
Norwegian anthropologist F. Barth (1928–2016) was most influential in the
formation of this approach to ethnic identity. In his ethnographic work in
Kurdistan, he focused on ethnicity as an individualising strategy and argued
against ethnic identity as a simple list of traits (dress, food, language, blood, and
culture) and stressed the importance of spatial, notional, and ideological bound-
aries for these features. According to Barth, ethnic identity is fluid and mutable.
To have ethnic identity means to do things in a certain way (Barth, 1969: 119).
Therefore, following Barth, ethnicity is not the same as culture; it is a marker of
the social border (Cornell, 2004: 70). According to T. D. Hall, although
primordial and instrumental approaches are often understood as mutually
opposite, they are in fact poles of a continuum. The key difference is timescale,
as ethnicity appears primordial, where the social processes that construct
ethnicity take place over many generations, but when the processes occur
over years or decades, social construction becomes more obvious (Hall, 2014:
52). The long history of the ancient Egyptian state and rich sources allow us
a unique opportunity to study both cases.
Only some Egyptologists explicitly adopted Barth’s ideas. In the previous
section, I have discussed the case of tracing ethnicity backwards using etho-
nyms in the case of the Libyans with all associated problems of such an
approach. In contrarst, E. M. Cole discusses evidence for the continuation of
Libyan identity in Egypt, arguing that according to Barth, ethnic identities can
be preserved if there are persisting cultural differences (Cole, 2015: 114).
However, Cole further argues that he understands markers of ethnic groups as

demonstrating cultural differences between the Libyan and the Egyptian ethnic
and cultural identity (Cole, 2015: 114). It is unclear on what basis he assumes
that ethnic and cultural identity are the same and which arguments he uses to
identify certain traits as ethnic rather than anything else. As I. Hodder has
demonstrated through his research in Kenya, ‘cultures did not always equal
ethnic units’ (Hodder, 1982: 11). According to Cole, the fact that Libyans were
keen on using Libyan rather than adopting Egyptian names like other foreign-
ers, indicates that naming was a cultural marker of Libyan ethnicity (Cole, 2015:
115). In Section 1, I have mentioned examples which contradict this; among
others, wives of Thutmose III buried as elite Egyptian women kept their foreign
names. The problem with Cole’s equation is that there is no simple and rigid
one-to-one relationship between ethnic groups and cultural similarities or
differences. Since not all traits are relevant for ethnic identity and cultural traits
end over time, also ethnic traits could change over time (Johnson, 1999: 212).
The crucial question is instead where does culture end and ethnicity begin
(Saini, 2019: 42). People of Libyan descent in the first millennium BC were
not less local because of their choice of Libyan names and not as foreign as
foreigners living outside Egypt. Keeping Libyan names could have been
a mechanism for tracing lineage, strengthening kinship, and claim to
a territory, rather than sending a deliberate message of being foreign and
different.
Glimpses of instrumentalist postulates are possibly seen in the approach of
several authors to the inhabitants of the Eastern Delta in the first half of
the second millennium BC. The formation of specific Eastern Delta pottery
tradition during the Hyksos period at Tell el-Dabca in the seventeenth and
sixteenth centuries BC (Bietak, Forstner-Müller & Mlinar, 2001: 172) is even
seen as an example of an ethnic group as a self-defining system (Haring, 2005:
171). According to I. Hodder, more marked differences in material culture of
different ethnic groups emerge in moments of great tension or stress, such as
competition over resources (Hodder, 1982: 35). The Hyksos kingdom in this
region had a competitive neighbour (for land and resources), the Theban
kingdom in the south. As was mentioned in the previous section, the Hyksos
rulers were of foreign origin, so it is interesting to consider the possibility that
changes in burial customs could have been a reflection of aspiring to certain
practices of the ruling class and other co-inhabitants of the region with foreign
origin. D. Arnold states that ‘growing involvement with regions beyond the
frontiers created a more intricate complex of relationships that not only changed
the Delta inhabitants’ material culture and way of life, but also have influenced
people’s self-understanding in fundamental ways’ (Arnold, 2010: 185). In
a way, Arnold’s understanding of the processes occurring in the Eastern Delta

during the Hyksos rule is also close to the approach to ethnic identity as
emerging from the shared habitus, as will be discussed.
One possible example of an instrumentalist approach may be found in
K. Liszka’s study of the Mḏ3.yw (also see Section 2). She argues that pastoral
nomads had been living for a while in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, not as
politically unified but diverse groups, and then asks when did these people adopt
the ethnic identity of the Mḏ3.yw as constructed by the Egyptians? (Liszka,
2011: 154). Prior to the late sixteenth century BC, Egyptian sources seem to
show a certain ambiguity towards the knowledge of the land of Eastern Desert
around the First and the Second Cataract and its inhabitants. Mḏ3 seems to be
a generic term signifying ‘ideologically constructed location southeast or east of
Egypt’ (Liszka, 2011: 158). Administrative texts and execration texts (a form of
curses) seem to put more emphasis on very specific toponyms in this region,
each with a prince and delivering tribute. According to Liszka, this indicates
that we are dealing with several entities which do not have to share common
group identity nor be politically uniform. In fact, Liszka has shown that those
individuals who most probably had origin in the Eastern Desert preferred to
identify themselves as Nḥs.y, a term which was used generally for southerners
(Michaux-Colombot, 2014: 508–9). She also demonstrated that sometimes the
term Mḏ3.yw is understood as belonging to the Nḥs.y and sometimes the two
terms are kept apart. Bearing in mind that both terms are Egyptian, and the fact
that even for Egyptians sometimes their differences were not so strong, indi-
cates that the people they described with those terms probably did not see
themselves in the same way. However, C. Rilly managed to demonstrate that
there was a difference in Mḏ3.yw and Kushite language and therefore argued
that the difference between a Mḏ3.y and a Nḥs.y was not only geographical and
sociological, but also linguistic (Rilly, 2019: 132). We should not exclude the
possibility that the Egyptians used one term for several different groups which
did not necessarily share one common language.
More aggressive Egyptian policy towards Lower Nubia during the nineteenth
century BC, building the military fortresses in this region and controlling the
movement of the people Egyptians described as Nḥs.y, could have encouraged
people of the Eastern Desert to identify as Mḏ3.yw. In a political context in
which identifying as Nḥs.y to Egyptians could do more harm than good, Mḏ3.yw
seems to be a convenient solution. This process of appropriation of
a stereotypical term coined by Egyptians by the people of the Eastern Desert
is, according to Liszka, related to the ethnogenesis of Mḏ3.yw. Ethnogenesis
refers to the formation of new cultural identities through historical and cultural
shifts that make previous kinds of identification less relevant, giving rise to new
forms of identity (Voss, 2008: 1). It can be intertwined with the formation of
a political community and it tends to occur at frontiers and borderlands,
especially in time of conflict and rupture (Hu, 2013: 391–4). Liszka argued
that the meaning of the word Mḏ3.yw shifted again after the sixteenth
century BC, when those who now identified themselves as Mḏ3.yw fought on
the side of the Theban kings against the Hyksos. Their reputation caused the
term to slowly but surely acquire a meaning of police, and later on any skilled
person could be called a Mḏ3.y no matter their ethnic background (Liszka, 2011:
163–7). The idea that the Mḏ3.yw lost ethnic connotation during the New
Kingdom was first proposed by W. M. Müller in 1910 and then elaborated by
A. H. Gardiner in 1947 and G. Posener in 1958. K. Liszka convincingly argues
that, contrary to some doubts, the Mḏ3.yw are in the Onomasticon of Amenope,
a text from the beginning of eleventh century BC, an occupation (specialised
police forces protecting the royal tombs) rather than an ethnic group (Liszka,
2010: 315–19). In fact, the title ʻleader of Mḏ3.ywʼ in the period between
fifteenth and eleventh century BC seems to be more attested with office bearers
having Egyptian names (Olsen, 2013: 145). But this does not necessarily mean
that their descent is not foreign. Most sources of this period indicate that the
Mḏ3.yw had the role of intermediaries and not of police, as often assumed
(Olsen, 2013: 155). Liszka warns us that her conclusion is still based on
Egyptian sources which could have quite distorted the ancient reality. Her
analysis is nuanced, yet one has to stress that the number of those who identify
themselves as Mḏ3.yw during the nineteenth century BC is rather small. Her
study nicely demonstrated the shifts in meaning of a toponym and an ethnonym,
and how it could be instrumentalised by some for their own benefits in certain
historical contexts. Namely, events on one periphery, Lower Nubia, caused
changes in relation to Egyptians in the other periphery (Eastern Desert).
A similar case of instrumentalist understanding of ethnicity is found in the
work of M. R. Buzon on Tombos. She argues that local Nubians could have
adopted Egyptian identity starting from the sixteenth century BC because of its
advantages (Buzon, 2008: 177). She argues that being a member of Egyptian
society meant having less violent experiences during one’s lifetime, and
assumes that Kerma during the eighteenth to sixteenth century BC was
a ‘culture of violence’ (Buzon, 2008: 180). However, although Buzon builds
her argument of a less violent Egyptian society in Nubia based on skeletal
evidence of trauma, she neglects numerous Egyptian textual and visual sources
indicating just how violent Egyptian society could also be (Bestock, 2018;
Matić, 2019).
The problem one faces with an instrumentalist approach is the degree to
which instrumentalist adoption of certain cultural traits or practices is indicative
of changes in ethnic identity. One good example is the use of Egyptian script and
iconography by the rulers of Kerma to project their power over their new
subjects in Lower Nubia starting from the seventeenth century BC. These
subjects included both local Nubians and Egyptian settlers who inhabited
previously Egyptian-governed military fortresses (Cooper, 2018). Rather than
seeing the use of Egyptian script and iconography as a change in expression of
Kushite ethnic identity, we should see this as a mechanism of exercising power
in a manner recognisable by a desired audience.
3.3 Topos and Mimesis: A Structuralist Approach

A specific approach to foreigners as depicted in ancient Egyptian texts has been
developed in Egyptology on the basis of structuralism; a linguistic, social, and
anthropological theory arguing that cultural elements must be understood
through their relationship to a broader system. A. Loprieno uses two concepts
in his analysis of foreigners in ancient Egyptian literature, topos and mimesis.
According to Loprieno, topos is characterised by semantic elements such as
+foreign+people-m3c.t (ancient Egyptian concept of order) and is found in
wisdom literature and royal discourse, whereas mimesis is characterised by
semantic elements such as +foreign+rmṯ (humans)+name and is found in
royal discourse and narrative literature (Loprieno, 1988: 15).
According to his formula, foreigners are not human (Loprieno, 1988: 22)
which actually cannot be confirmed by Egyptian sources (Moers, 2005).
Furthermore, whereas mimetic foreigners in literature are named, come forth
as individuals, have speaking capacity and human appearance, topic foreigners
are ethnically connotated, do not have speaking capacity, and have unhuman
appearance (Loprieno, 1988: 44). These concepts, developed by Loprieno, were
adopted by other Egyptologists. S. T. Smith uses these concepts ‘to contrast the
creation and deployment of ethnic stereotypes in the state ideology with the
more nuanced and fluid depiction of ethnicity in more prosaic texts and personal
monuments’ (Smith, 2007: 220). According to T. Schneider, topos is society’s
official and normative perception, and mimesis a narrative attempt to portray
foreigners as valuable individuals (Schneider, 2010: 147). A. D. Espinel argues
that official or canonical, stereotypical representations of the third
millennium BC fall under the category topos, whereas the profane, private, or
daily sphere and its representation fall under the category mimesis, ‘a sphere
where the interpretation of reality has not passed through the filter of the
mythical perspective’. According to Espinel, mimesis reveals an Egyptian
view of reality linked to daily nature and stressed that the dividing line is not
as clear as one would expect (Espinel, 2006: 446). However, the crucial idea of
Loprieno that both topos and mimesis are literally constructs is missed. They are
not a direct reflection of reality or daily experiences with foreigners, which were
surely as diverse as ancient Egyptian society itself.
This structuralist approach to ancient Egyptian texts describing foreigners or
images depicting them, although useful in understanding their ideological
background, helps us little in understanding the dynamic processes behind
ethnic constructions and identifications.
3.4 Egyptianness and Foreignness: Habitus and Ethnic Identity

The concept of habitus (for definition, see Section 1) is used to bridge the
polarisation of primordialist and instrumentalist views of ethnicity and to com-
prehend their relationship to culture (Skiapas, 2014: 72). Although a fairly well-
known concept in other historical fields and archaeologies (Schreg et al., 2013:
109), less has been written on its use in Egyptology.
S. T. Smith is one of the rare Egyptologists who has used the concept of
habitus in his research. He argued that the tension between individuals and
habitus is particularly heightened in situations of cultural contact, such as the
case with Egyptians in Nubia (Smith, 2014: 195). In several of his studies he
argues that the steady increase of Nubian pots in an Egyptian fortress at Askut in
Nubia, and thus presumably Nubian cuisine over time, implies that this phe-
nomenon is not just a passive retention of a Nubian habitus, but an active
assertion of Nubian ethnic identity that eventually managed to dominate
(Smith, 2003b: 193–205; Smith, 2007: 234; Smith, 2014: 204). In his latest
work, Smith argues that the use of cooking pottery could be an example of the
reflection of habitus of Nubian women within the colony (Smith, 2018: 136).
There are several related problems which have to be considered.
First is the assumption of direct correlation between Nubian pots, cuisine, and
ethnic identity. Second is the assumption that the increased use of Nubian pots,
and presumably preference for Nubian cuisine, reflects increased presence of
Nubian identity, however this presence is understood, as the physical presence
of Nubians or a change in the identity of the Egyptians stationed in military
fortresses in Lower Nubia. There is also an equally valid possibility that this
increase in Nubian pots rather reflects changes in taste and preference for either
these vessels, or the food which was, or could be, prepared or served using them.
This change does not necessarily reflect a change in ethnic identity, but rather
the change in habitus. For example, C. Walsh has demonstrated that the contexts
of Kerma pottery from Egypt during the first half of second millennium BC do
not necessarily point to Kerman identity or origin for its users, but rather to
shared tastes, at least among some, because only specific vessel forms (beakers)
were being used in Egypt (Walsh, 2018: 43; for similar arguments for sixteenth
and fifteenth century BC Egypt, see Raue, 2019b: 578). One should also consider
the possibility that shared culinary practices can minimise rather than highlight
difference (Voss, 2008: 250). An approach more in line with the concept of
habitus would be to understand these changes as something that even those who
were affected by them did not notice themselves. These changes slowly but
surely became part of what they did, but they did not necessarily become part of
who they were. One does not need to confine analysis within geographical areas
or ethnic communities, but can discuss the frequency and extent of certain
practices over time and space independently of their assumed cultural origins
(Cornell & Fahlander, 2007: 8).
The third problem with Smith’s interpretation is the one concerning gender.
Namely, Smith assumes that cooking was an activity of women and that
therefore the presence of Nubian cooking pots indicates not only physical
presence of Nubian women, but also that they married Egyptian soldiers
(Smith, 2003a: 56–7). Similarly, B. Bader relates the presence (2.5 per cent)
of hand-made imported flat-based cooking pots, common in the southern part of
Syria-Palestine, at Tell el-Dabca as evidence for the presence of women with
a Syro-Palestinian cultural background (Bader, 2011: 64–5). E. Pappa has
rightly emphasised that such a binary gender pattern behind archaeological
interpretations of actors in contact zones repeats quite often and reflects stereo-
typical colonial gender assumptions, regardless of the studied context (Pappa,
2013). Whether one finds oneself in Askut in Nubia or in ancient Avaris in the
eastern Delta (Bietak, 2016: 265), it is always the settler men, often interpreted
as warriors or soldiers, who marry local women. Pappa argues that such colonial
models cannot be a priori taken without proper investigation.
Smith assumes that there were no women in the Egyptian fortresses in Lower
Nubia and he also assumes that stationed men, soldiers or others, needed women
to do the cooking, because in Egyptian society cooking was usually associated
with women in the textual and iconographic record. However, we are clearly
dealing with different contexts and one cannot exclude that in military forts men
took on themselves some activities which they could have been less associated
with in other contexts. Furthermore, although maybe not attested at the Askut
fortress, women were surely also inhabitants of other Egyptian fortresses in
Lower Nubia, as possibly evidenced by a sealing from Mirgissa (Room 47)
belonging to a woman, ʻlady of the houseʼ, named Nebet-Kepeny or Lady of
Byblos (Mourad, 2017: 388). When Tell el-Dabca and presence of foreign women
is concerned, although being recently confirmed based on isotope analyses (see
Section 4 for details), this does not mean that only Syro-Palestinian women were
associated with the use of handmade cooking pots as assumed by Bader.
Most recently, K. Liszka uses habitus as a tool in her study of dry-stone

architecture at Wadi el-Hudi, el-Hisnein, and Dihmit, sites related to early second
millennium BC mining activity in the Eastern Desert. She argues that the different
building traditions of Egyptians (mudbrick) and dry-stone (Nubians) reflect
a different habitus in each case. Comparison with Nubian architecture from the
Nubian site Wadi es-Sebua allowed her to trace Nubian building techniques at
Egyptian mining sites and argue that Nubians were involved in building the
structures for Egyptians, as the structures have Egyptian design (Liszka, 2017:
6–7). She reinforces her interpretation by referring to an inscription from Wadi el-
Hudi in which the Egyptian steward Intef, son of Pashedu, mentions that he brought
with him all the Nḥs.y of Wawat (Lower Nubia), Sety (Upper Egypt?), and south
and north (Liszka, 2017: 11). The problem is that as much as this example nicely
demonstrates the proper understanding of the concept of habitus, it does not clearly
demonstrate its connection to ethnicity. For example, K. Liszka argues that habitus
can become an ethnic marker when contrasting forms of behaviour are juxtaposed
from two different cultures (Liszka, 2017: 7), but apart from identifying Nubian
presence based on building tradition (dry-stone architecture), written sources, and
Nubian pottery, she does not use the idea that difference in habitus can become an
ethnic marker. In fact, the written sources she quotes indicate that the Nubians
presumably employed as builders were already considered to be foreign. Egyptians
and Nubians did not have to juxtapose their building traditions to recognise each
other as being different. Their native languages were different, so were their
customs, cuisine, etc.
3.5 Postcolonial Theory and Ethnic Identity

Colonisation can be most broadly defined as ‘appropriation of a previously
autonomous region and its transformation into a dependency under the control
of a remote entity’ (Voss, 2008: 2). Defined like this, colonisation is a concept
applicable to different cases of the expansion of ancient Egyptian state and
settling of Egyptians to various degrees in neighbouring territories (for different
imperial and colonial models see Smith, 1991). However, colonialism is a much
broader concept in which the coloniser and the colonised are in an asymmetrical
power relationship in which the coloniser is argued to be more advanced and
therefore the dominant force in the relationship. Unlike, colonisation, colonial-
ism is much more difficult to apply in cases of ancient Egyptian relationships to
populations in newly conquered lands. As we have seen in Section 2, early
scholars did not find it problematic to interpret the past based on their own
colonial experiences in the present. The reason for this is the racist assumption
that colonised populations, being racially impeded, do not and cannot change.
The complex and divergent field of postcolonial studies and postcolonial

theory had made a major impact on archaeology since the 1990s. Unlike
colonialism, postcolonial theory brings back agency to the colonised and argues
that colonial experience changes the coloniser as much as the colonised. Just
like the instrumentalist approach to ethnic identity, it argues against the essen-
tialist notion of identity and puts focus on complex phenomena of social
encounter and interaction, and on all of its unpredictable consequences. The
works of postcolonial scholars such as E. Said (1935–2003) and G. Ch. Spivak
(1942–) influenced revisions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship
and the way archaeologists, historians, and art historians study one culturesʼ
representations of other cultures. Whereas Said stressed that the way the
Western world perceives the East is rooted in a long tradition of false romanti-
cised images and discoursive strategies he terms orientalism (Said, 1978),
Spivak asks if the subaltern, colonial populations who are socially, politically,
and geographically outside the hierarchy of power, can even speak? (Spivak,
1998). She argues that the white male Western academic thinking is produced in
order to support Western economical interests. Speaking in the name of the
subaltern should not be confused with actual subaltern experiences. In the case
of ancient Egypt, these ideas become clear when one bears in mind that we are
more often than not confronted with ancient Egyptian representations of the
foreigners and that when foreigners in ancient Egyptian contexts depict them-
selves, they do so using ancient Egyptian patterns of representation (Section 1).
Three main theoretical concepts coming from the work of H. Bhabha (1949–),
one of the most quoted postcolonial theorists, are often found in recent archaeo-
logical works: hybridism, mimicry, and third space (Matić, 2017). For each of the
terms, I will first discuss their meaning within postcolonial theory and then their
usage in archaeology more broadly and Egyptology specifically. Numerous recent
archaeological and Egyptological studies in which a reference to Bhabha’s work is
provided without clear implication on the study cannot be covered here.
3.5.1 Hybridism
Hybrid, in postcolonial theory, is a subject inhabiting an in-between reality and
questioning the images and presence of authority (Bhabha, 1994: 13–113).
According to H. Bhabha, all social collectives, nation states, cultures, and
small-scale ethnic groups are caught in continuous processes of hybridity. He
argued that encounters result in something new and substantially different than
just conglomerates of new and old elements, because hybridity is not a problem
of genealogy or identity between two cultures (Bhabha, 1994: 114). Yet, if
following Bhabha, no culture is pure and each is a hybrid, then hybridity
becomes a redundant term with limited use as a conceptual tool. The very use of
the terms Myceanean, Roman, or Asian means accepting the existence of
something pure (Stockhammer, 2013: 12–13). How similar were Myceaneans
living in continental Greece to those living outside of it? Is being Roman the
same in Rome and in Alexandria in Egypt in first century AD? Does the term
Asian do justice to diverse ethnic and religious groups in Asia? In Section 1 of
this Element, I explained how problematic the term ancient Egyptians is
because it groups people of different age, gender, class, etc., not respecting
their diverse experiences. Equally, there is no reason we should consider
Egyptian neighbours to have been less diverse on these and other aspects of
identity.
P. W. Stockhammer has effectively argued that archaeologists perceive those
objects as hybrids which seem to resist classification within predetermined
taxonomies (Stockhammer, 2013: 11–13). The fact that some authors tend to
explore cultural mixture by taking the hybrid apart and seek out its source
components (Van Valkenburgh, 2013: 305) indicates that this has little to do
with postcolonial notion of hybridity.
For example, in ancient Egyptian art, there are cases of hybrid foreign figures
which have iconographic elements of different groups combined; for example,
Syrian-Aegean hybrid figures from the fifteenth century BC tombs of Puimre
(Figure 9) and Menkheperreseneb, both high officials of their time. P. Rehak, an
archaeologist specialising in the Bronze Age Aegean, argued that these hybrid
figures maybe represent a mixture of the two or more populations which can be
Figure 9 Aegean-Syrian hybrid figure, third from the left, among

rulers from the North, ‘Asia’, from the tomb of Puimre
(after Davies, 1922: Pl. I)
expected ‘in some of the cosmopolitan port towns of Syria-Palestine or the Nile
Delta in the Late Bronze Age’ (Rehak, 1998: 47). Some Egyptologists argued
that these iconographic hybrid figures could derive from accurate observations
of the crews of the trading vessels docked in the Egyptian ports. It has been
suggested that the men of the Uluburun ship, a fourteenth century BC shipwreck
in south-western Turkey with material culture of diverse provenance, might
have resembled these hybrids (Darnell & Manassa, 2007: 202).
Such interpretations tell us that these authors understood iconographic
hybridism as a method of representing cultural mixture and that they understand
cultural mixture as merging of two or more cultures. However, there have never
existed ‘down to the waist Aegeans and up to the waist Syrians’, which does not
mean that we should not take the hybrid figures into account at all. That these
individuals actually did not look like this, does not mean that the crews of the
trading ships did not have identities which are beyond the dichotomies we
establish where ethnicity is concerned (e.g. Aegean, Syrian, or any other).
Where Egyptian iconography is concerned, these hybrid figures have to be
understood through principles of representation and decorum in which like is
hybridised with like. There are no hybrid figures combining northern and
southern Egyptian neighbours. During the fifteenth century BC and later, both
Aegeans and Syrians are associated with the north in Egyptian cultural geog-
raphy (Quack, 1996: 77–9; Safronov, 2017: 750–3) and therefore it should come
as no surprise that figures from these regions could be hybridised (Matić, 2014b:
282–7).
Precisely because archaeologists more often than not confuse visual hybrid-
ism with the postcolonial concept of hybridism, some alternatives have been
proposed. Ph. Stockhammer prefers the term entanglement to hybridity, hybrid-
ism, and hybridisation for several reasons. He argues that in postcolonial studies
these terms are used as political metaphor and also that they have pejorative
biological background (Stockhammer, 2012: 89). For him, entanglement is
a concept to be used to describe the phenomena that are the result of the creative
process triggered by intercultural encounters (Stockhammer, 2013: 16). He
distinguishes between material and relational entanglement where the first
refers to an entangled object and the second to entanglement of past practices
with an object (Stockhammer, 2013: 23). The term entanglement has also found
its way into the archaeology of Egypt and Nubia. For example, K. Liszka uses it
for previously mentioned dry-stone architecture at mining sites in the Eastern
desert. She argues that the case of architecture in Egyptian design but Nubian
building tradition represents ‘entangled cultures; the forms of one culture are
created with the material technique of another’ (Liszka, 2017: 14). There are
numerous other authors who utilise the term nowadays and there is not enough
space here to refer to all of them. A close read of recent works actually shows
that rather than utilising the concept and what it epistemologically refers to,
many authors frequently simply use the word.
Another case is often discussed by those Egyptologists close to postcolonial
theory and the concept of the hybrid. This is the case of Hekanefer, prince of
Miam, during the time of Egyptian control of Nubia from fifteenth to eleventh
century BC. Hekanefer was administrator of ancient Miam (Aniba in Lower
Nubia) and answered to Huy, viceroy of Nubia during the reign of
Tutankhamun in the fourteenth century BC. In the tomb of Huy in Thebes,
Hekanefer is depicted as a Nubian in a tribute scene together with other
Nubians (Figure 10), but in his own tomb in Nubia (Figure 11) he is depicted
as an Egyptian official. In fact, his tomb is a tomb of an Egyptian official, as both
its decoration and equipment match those of the Egyptian elite from Egypt.
Egyptologists interpret the case of Hekanefer in different ways. There are those
who argue that Hekanefer was required to appear as a Nubian at the Egyptian
court, because the entire context of his appearance there, namely a New Year’s
festival, was a showcase of royal ideology (Smith, 2007: 240), or because he was
simply still seen as Nubian by Egyptians (Kemp, 2018: 38). Others suggested that
Hekanefer had a specific double identity (van Pelt, 2013). What we have to bear in
mind is that we are comparing two entirely different forms of evidence.
In the tomb of Huy, Hekanefer and other Nubians are depicted in a tribute
scene – a term used by Egyptologists to describe visual representation of an
event which supposedly occurred once a year in Egypt during the celebration of
the New Year. During the event, foreign emissaries of different status vis-à-vis
Egypt and each other would bring various objects, resources, and people to the
Egyptian king. These scenes existed at least from the time of Hatshepsut in
fifteenth century BC and by the time of Tutankhamun they were well established
and structured (Hallmann, 2006). There were certain rules on how to depict
whom, which does not mean that the artists could not deviate from these rules in
different contexts. In the tribute scene from the tomb of Huy, Hekanefer is not
depicted by himself. In the case of his own tomb he would have had more
agency where decoration and his self-representation was concerned, as con-
struction of his tomb started when he was still living. The comparison would be
on a different epistemological level if we were comparing two different repre-
sentations initiated by Hekanefer himself. This is not the case here. It is even
questionable if he actually appeared at the Egyptian court the way he is depicted
in the tomb of Huy. Only if we could be sure this was the case, could we then
discuss his agency behind this type of appearance. The artists who painted the
tribute scene from the tomb of Huy worked with an already existing pattern and
were not necessarily present at the ceremony in which Hekanefer and his
Figure 10 Hekanefer as a Nubian ruler in the tribute scene from the tomb of Huy, viceroy of Nubia under Tutankhamun (https://www
.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/548571)
Figure 11 Hekanefer as an Egyptian in his tomb in Toshka, Nubia

(redrawn after Simpson, 1963: fig. 7)
entourage appeared. The fact that they depicted them as Nubians wearing both
Nubian and Egyptian dress indicates that the artists creatively adjusted the
established pattern to a new situation. If they had depicted Hekanefer and his
entourage entirely as Egyptian officials, the purpose of the tribute scene to
present an ecumenic dominion of the pharaoh over foreign lands would have
been lost.
Whether or not the case of Hekanefer is a case of hybridity, understood as in
the work of H. Bhabha, is a complicated question. This is primarily because we
lack evidence that Hekanefer, as a man of Nubian origin in Egyptian state
apparatus, used his position to question the authority of Egyptian state or
culture. A recent suggestion that ‘tribute scenes such as the one at TT40,
depicting Nubians bringing gold and other treasures from their country, could
have been interpreted by Nubians as expression of their own power and their
ability to provide Egypt with resources’ (Lemos, 2020: 7) is not supported by
evidence. The event tribute scenes depicted were pharaoh centred, as indicated
by numerous diplomatic letters in which the rulers of foreign countries com-
plain on how both the gifts and the emissaries they sent were misrepresented or
mistreated during such an event (Matić, 2017; Matić, 2019). We should equally
not consider Hekanefer and his entourage to have been naïve on their position in
the state apparatus. The state of Egypt exploited Nubian resources and although
some of the locals have rebelled, others were cooperating with Egyptians. The
worst mistake pseudo postcolonial revisions can make is to generalise the
‘colonisers’ into nonviolent and friendly settlers, and the ‘subaltern’ into
naïve people devoid of motives and strategies.
Rather, on the contrary, Hekanefer’s burial in Nubia indicates that he used his
position in Egyptian state apparatus to his own benefits, profiling himself within
a diaspora Lower Nubian community of Egyptians and Nubians as a member of
the Egyptian elite. It is indeed tempting to see this as related to ethnic identity,
however, Hekanefer does not present himself as just any Egyptian. Status plays
the most significant role here.
3.5.2 Mimicry
Mimicry, in the work of H. Bhabha, is almost like an imitation, but not quite the
same, as exact imitation would not have the main aspect of mimicry, and that is
the potential to question the normative systems of knowledge, the colonial
discourse, and relations of power (Bhabha, 1994: 91–120). We have an example
for this social phenomenon attested in the Amarna letters. These are diplomatic
letters written in the Akkadian language, lingua franca of the Late Bronze Age
Near East and found in Tell el-Amarna, capital of Egypt during the reign of
Akhenaten in fourteenth century BC. In one of these letters (EA 4), the king of
Babylon asks for any Egyptian woman to be sent to him in marriage. He adds
that no one in Babylon will know that she is not a princess. Clearly, the king of
Babylon is insisting on one thing only and that is that the woman sent by the
pharaoh is an Egyptian woman. Several scholars have already noted that the
king of Egypt, just as other Late Bronze Age kings, gladly took foreign women,
often daughters of foreign kings, for wives. However, there are indications that
he did not send Egyptian women to be married to foreign kings as gladly. By
having an Egyptian woman represented at his court as an Egyptian princess, the
king of Babylon attempted to achieve a mimic effect that would elevate his
status (Matić, 2017: 100).
This example demonstrates that mimicry can be used to question Egyptian

authority; however, here this is not done by mimicking ethnic identity, rather,
the ethnic identity of the requested woman is seen as a possibility for expression
of an elevated status of the Babylonian king. Unlike in the case of Hekanefer,
the status of this woman plays no role here, at least not for the king of Babylon.
3.5.3 Third Space
Other concepts frequent in postcolonial theory have found their way into the
archaeology of Egypt too. B. Bader calls the diverse community at Tell el-Dabca
creole (Bader, 2011: 62). L. Steel argues that second-millennium BC Gaza of the
southern Levant was a cosmopolitan period characterised by Egyptian colonial
activity. Accordingly, the communities at either end of the Way of Horus, an
ancient road leading from Egypt to Levant, both in the Nile Delta and around the
mouth of Gaza, were creolised (Steel, 2018: 24). As an example, she gives the use
of Egyptian-style anthropomorphic clay coffins, which she argues were used by
Egyptianised locals who appropriated only some aspects of Egyptian funerary
customs, whereas other customs one would expect if the deceased were Egyptian
(e.g. mummification) were not present (Steel, 2018: 22).
However, the term creole has a specific historical background: it originally
refers to ethnic groups originating in colonial era of the sixteenth to nineteenth
century, after the mixing of European colonisers and people from the colonies.
This phenomenon is different than emergence of creole languages which are
developed from simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one.
The difference between creole phenomena of the colonial era and the phenom-
ena of third and second millennium BC in Egypt is the scale of the encounter.
Unlike in the colonial era, when Europeans and some people from the colonies
encountered each other for the first time, ancient Egyptians had long history of
contact with their neighbours. The effects of such encounters simply cannot be
the same.
These examples serve to demonstrate that reflexivity towards terms we use
and theories we apply should not remain only as points of criticism towards
early authors, but also as a constant reminder to ourselves not to overlook
historical contingency of the concepts we ourselves use. More specific discus-
sions on ethnicity found in the vast field of postcolonial studies are rarely
consulted. According to L. Hutcheon, ‘any sense of ethnicity is bound to be
configured differently in a new place because of the inevitable changes that
come with displacement’ (Hutcheon et al., 1998: 30). We must bear in mind that
people can find themselves in unhomely situations. Unhomely is another term
related to H. Bhabha who describes it as capturing ‘something of the estranging
sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place’
(Bhabha, 1992: 141). For example, Toronto’s 1990s Little Italy lacked a cultural
resemblance to the Italy of the same time. What we learn from historical
archaeologists investigating colonialism is that changes can occur in a society
to such a level that they can limit the use of simple analogies between the society
in question and its diaspora, one example for this being African societies and
their American diasporas (Cruz, 2011: 338). This is a warning to Egyptologists
when they compare the archaeological record of ancient Egyptian core and their
presence in, for example, the lands Egyptians conquered and controlled such as
Nubia and Syria-Palestine. Neither the ‘core’ nor the ‘periphery’ were homo-
genous. H. Bhabha uses the term third space as a metaphor to describe the
negotiation of differences between cultures. This negotiation produces tension
specific for borderline existences (Bhabha, 1992: 218). However, the term third
space is often confused by archaeologists for actual space of encounter. Rather,
it is a metaphor for a specific kind of encounter with unforeseen consequences
on all who took part in it (Matić, 2017: 103–4). Thus, instead of approaching
ancient Egyptian encounters with foreigners as if we already knew their results,
we should open the possibilities to the unplanned, unexpected, and different
consequences these encounters could have had for all sides.
3.6 Intersectionality
Identity is multiscalar (Voss, 2008: 13), meaning that people rarely have the
same experiences as others. Being a man or a woman, young or old, or members
of an ethnic group can result in vastly different experiences. Additional differ-
ences come into play where class or status is concerned, and in some societies
even sexuality and other aspects of identity also come into play. Therefore,
intersectionality is a concept which reminds us that ethnic identity cannot be
looked for or studied in isolation from other forms of identity. For example, to
be a proper Nafana in Ghana is to be born of a Nafana woman who went through
Nafana nobility and marriage rites, including circumcision (Cruz, 2011: 344).
Intersectionality is a concept rarely considered by Egyptologists, although
there are some notable exceptions (e.g. Meskell, 1999, although she does not
deal with ethnic identity; Moers 2016: 694). For example, K. Liszka discusses the
case of a woman named Aashyet, from twenty-first century BC Egypt, who on her
sarcophagus is, together with some other female members of her household,
depicted with dark skin. Liszka argues that we have to bear in mind her gender,
occupation (priestess of goddess Hathor), and status in order to understand her
choosing to be depicted with dark skin instead of yellowish skin according to
gender convention for women in ancient Egypt (Liszka, 2018).
Clearly there was also a gender background of different status for the Nubians
depicted in the tribute scene from the tomb of Huy from the reign of Tutankhamun
(Figure 10) and age-related gender differences among Nubian women depicted in
the tribute scene from the tomb of Rekhmire (TT 100) from the reign of Thutmose
III in fifteenth century BC (Figure 12). Different groups of Nubian women depicted
here, namely those with children, those without children, and those depicted as
young girls, correspond to different categories Egyptians used for captured women
in their lists of spoils of war, namely married/with child, social virgin/not married,
and young girl. Such a division does not necessarily correspond to age/gender
categories among the Nubians, nevertheless it is imposed by the Egyptian admin-
istration (Matić, 2020).
Whereas some Nubian women from the scene from the tomb of Huy can be
interpreted as being part of Hekanefer’s high-status elite household, with
perhaps his wife and daughters among them, other women from this tribute
scene are Nubian prisoners accompanied by their children (Pemler, 2018).
There has also been a suggestion that the representation of an elite Nubian
woman dressed as an Egyptian woman and riding in a chariot pulled by cattle
was meant to be mocked by the viewers of the scene in the tomb of Huy
(Burmeister, 2013: 138). Still, others have challenged this, because apart from
the unique combination of a ʻprincessʼ and chariot pulled by oxen there is
nothing else to indicate mockery. D. Pemler suggests that oxen are depicted
instead of horses because Nubians of this period were more famous for their
cattle (Pemler, 2018: 37).
These cases are just some of many which warn us that experiences of ethnic
identity were different depending on age, gender, and status, at least, and there
must have been other factors involved as well.
4 Third Science Revolution

4.1 Archaeology and the Third Science Revolution
The old idea that identity may be read from the bones of ancient peoples (Section
2) is slowly reviving in archaeology. Advances in analyses of ancient DNA and
stable isotopes have triggered considerable new research. The DNA data can be
used to identify statistical groupings of individuals who share more genetic
variants with each other than with individuals outside these groups (Eisenmann
et al., 2018). Isotopes of strontium, oxygen, and lead have been used in the studies
of provenance of human remains. Analyses involve comparison of isotope ratios in
tooth enamel and bone. As the enamel in teeth forms in early childhood and
undergoes little change, it is a reliable indicator of strontium isotopes. Human bone
is more dynamic. Values in human teeth indicating place of birth and early
Figure 12 Nubian women of different age in the tribute scene from the tomb of Rekhmire (TT 100), vizier of Thutmose III
(redrawn after Davies, 1943: Pls. XXI and XXII, graphic A. Hassler, ÖAI/ÖAW)
childhood which do not match those from bone (place of death) indicate immi-
grants (Weiner, 2010: 32–5). These developments in science and their implications
in archaeology have been quite optimistically termed ‘the third science revolution’
(Kristiansen, 2014).
This optimism did not go without criticism aimed at the assumption that ‘the
third science revolution’ would cause much necessary critical discussions on
ethnicity. Critical thinking involves examining the premises and frames even
before the data is collected and analysed, or more precisely even before the data
is produced (Niklasson, 2014: 59). For example, whereas, so-called hard sci-
ence identifies Phoenician DNA, historians are uncomfortable with even speak-
ing about Phoenicians (McInerney, 2014: 5). Although analyses might be state
of the art, the way the data is sampled and the samples are interpreted is often
anything but. For example, teeth of specific individuals are used to provide
samples for analyses, however, these individuals are chosen to be representa-
tives of different prehistoric archaeological cultures which still match the ones
mapped by V. G. Childe (Hakenbeck, 2019). Thus, genetic samples stand not
only for teeth of different individuals, they stand for entire archaeological
cultures which are in this process understood as ethnic groups (see Section 2
for details). The same logic of culture-historical archaeology is now applied not
on pots representing people, but on physical remains representing ‘peoples’. In
some cases, individuals were found with genetic make-up significantly different
than the rest of the population of the cemetery in which they were buried,
although all could be classified as belonging to a single archaeological culture
(Eisenmann et al., 2018). An additional problem with most of the attempts to
correlate cultural and genetic evidence is the assumption of endogamy as the
norm throughout history and across cultures (Chrisomalis & Trigger, 2003: 5).
Marrying only within the limits of a local community cannot be assumed before
the analyses are done.
Although DNA and isotope analyses can help us to identify individuals
whose genetic makeup differs from the rest of the community, indicating that
they are either foreigners or descendants of foreigners, these analyses are not
enough for studies of ethnic identity.
4.2 Egyptology and Third Science Revolution

This new hype has also found its way into the archaeology of Egypt, and, not
surprisingly, with this came the associated problematic assumptions on ethnic
identity that are rooted in culture-historical archaeology. For example, it has been
suggested that DNA analysis could provide the answer to the question of
Maiherperi’s ethnic identity (Lakomy, 2016: 308). Maiherperi was the child of
the royal nursery and fanbearer on the king, probably under king Thutmose III in
fifteenth century BC, and was buried in the Valley of the Kings (KV 36), which
was a rare privilege. In vignettes of his Book of the Dead papyrus (CG 24095),
Maiherperi is depicted with dark brown skin colour and in one case with curly
hair reaching his chin (Lakomy, 2016: Tf. 135, Abb. 530, Tf. 148, Abb. 556). This
is usually interpreted as a Nubian feature, also argued to be confirmed by his
mummy (Schneider, 2010: 115; Smith, 2007: 230). Therefore, Egyptologists tend
to interpret Maiherperi as an assimilated Nubian. The idea that his ʻrealʼ identity
can be uncovered using ancient DNA demonstrates a primordial understanding of
ethnic identity (see Section 3 for details). The actual social practices of
Maiherperi are silently considered less important than the depiction of his skin.
There are numerous problems with the idea that isotopes and DNA can solve
the enigmas of ethnic identities. One of these problems is strictly methodological.
The Nile’s complex fluvial regime, together with the underlying geology of the
Nile Valley and Nile’s source regions, pose problems for isotope analyses
(Woodward et al., 2015). Another problem is the pristine preservation of collagen
in some contexts, such are the sites in the Sudan because of the heat and dry sandy
soil (Spencer, Stevens & Binder, 2017: 46). Geological research has pointed to the
impact of aeolian sands on the sedimentary composition of the Nile and its
tributaries as a major confounding factor in the strontium signatures of water.
Being that these are highly variable, and depend on climatic conditions, they
could significantly alter isotopic values and potentially lead to erroneous conclu-
sions (Binder, 2019: 114; Woodward et al., 2015). M. R. Buzon and her associates
claim that it was possible to identify individuals from Thebes in Upper Egypt at
the Nubian site of Tombos in Upper Nubia because strontium at Tombos probably
comes from soil rather than the Nile water (Buzon, Simonetti & Creaser, 2007:
1400). In another study of strontium isotope values from the Tombos cemetery
sample, M. R. Buzon and A. Simonetti argue that during the period from
c.1550–1070 BC, individuals from Egypt can be traced at the site and that during
first millennium BC only locals can be traced, with some immigrants possibly
coming from the south (Buzon & Simonetti, 2013: 7). However, the recent study
of Nileʼs fluvial regimes and its influence on isotope analyses stressed that caution
is necessary in interpreting the results in such manner (Woodward et al., 2015).
The most recent study of strontium isotope ratios of samples from nine individ-
uals from tomb 26 from cemetery SAC 5 on Sai island in Upper Nubia argues that
all of them were local. The burial, itself dating to fifteenth to thirteenth century BC,
was found as part of an Egyptian-style rock-hewn shaft tomb with a pyramid as
a superstructure. It contained two painted wooden coffins, scarabs, faience
vessels, pottery vessels, and one stone shabti figurine, fragments of funerary
masks with inlayed eyes and gold foil. According to the inscribed finds, the burial
belonged to Khnumose who was an Overseer of Goldsmiths and his unnamed

wife (Retzmann et al., 2019). These individuals had an Egyptian burial with
Egyptian material culture. Khnumose had an Egyptian name and an Egyptian
title. Clearly, his Nubian origin, as in the cases of Hekanefer (Section 3) and
Maiherperi, was not an obstacle in having a prestigious occupation under
Egyptian rule and being member of the Egyptian elite.
A study of ancient Egyptian mummy genomes published by
V. J. Schuenemann and her associates, aimed to investigate changes and
continuities in the genetic makeup of the inhabitants of the Abusir el-Meleq
in region of the Fayum in antiquity. One statement in this paper particularly
deserves critical attention: ‘Particularly, in the first millennium BCE Egypt
endured foreign domination leading to growing numbers of foreigners living
within its borders possibly contributing genetically to the local population’
(Schuenemann et al., 2017: 1).
Several phenomena are confused here. Foreign rule (dominations) is under-
stood as a factor leading to a growing number of foreigners. The first
millennium BC division of the previously united land led to the emergence of
the Libyan Dynasty in the north, and later to the conquering of Egypt by Kushite
kings from Nubia. However, these Libyan kings used Egyptian iconography and
language, prayed to Egyptian gods, and were buried as Egyptian kings (Vittmann,
2003). The population from which they came had been living in Egypt for
centuries until men bearing names of Libyan origin took over power in one part
of the land. It all comes down to understanding these individuals as foreigners
because of the non-Egyptian origin of their personal names. As we have seen in
the previous section, this is a very problematic assumption. The same can be said
for the Kushite rulers of Egypt during c.750–650 BC. Although bringing with them
some inherently Kushite elements of royal ideology, kingship, religion, and
kinship they still also used Egyptian iconography and language, prayed to
Egyptian gods, and were buried in a tradition with predominately Egyptian
elements. The same may be said for the private personas of Kushite descent
buried in Egypt. There is no comprehensive evidence based on textual sources
and archaeology that an increased number of people of various origins came to
Egypt in the first half of the first millennium BC (Budka, 2019). This increase in
foreign presence because of foreign rule is even less evident during the Assyrian
(seventh century BC) and Persian (sixth to fourth century BC) rule of Egypt
(Vittmann, 2003). It seems that the first real demographic changes began slowly
after Persian rule and especially during Ptolemaic and Roman rule of Egypt, from
fourth century BC onwards (Riggs, 2005; Rowlandson, 2013).
The study of Schuenemann and her associates was based on ninety mitochon-
drial genomes and genome-wide data sets from three individuals from Abusir
el-Meleq in Middle Egypt and dating from the sixteenth century BC to the
Roman period (30 BC to seventh century AD). Some 166 samples were taken
from 151 mummified individuals. They group the individuals according to
radiocarbon dates into three groups: pre-Ptolemaic (from c.1550–300 BC),
Ptolemaic (from c.300 to 31 BC) and Roman (30 BC to seventh century AD).
This is problematic if one bears in mind that the individuals from the first group
come from a time span of almost 1,250 years, the second group of almost 300
years, and the third group of almost 700 years. There are also some statements
which are given rather uncritically. Namely, the authors assume that there was
a large-scale immigration of Canaanite population which they describe as
‘known as the Hyksos’ into Lower Egypt during the second millennium BC.
This is surprising because the argument of Canaanite invasion is based on the
culture-historical ‘pots equal people’ assumption which is criticised by
Schuenemann and her associates at the beginning of the paper. The Hyksos
are, as we have seen in Section 2, originally a reference to the ruling class of
Avaris and not its entire population, which consisted of people of local and
foreign origin and new migrants from the eastern Mediterranean. It is erroneous
to treat the population of Avaris as a closed population in an anthropological
sense which can then be compared to other populations, for example, those in
the Levant (Forstner-Müller & Müller, 2006: 96). Striking similarities can be
noticed between the studies on ancient DNA of prehistoric Europe and the
studies of DNA of ancient Egypt. A critical reflection towards both terms used
and methods applied is necessary.
Another similar study aims to use DNA and isotope analyses to solve the
problem of the origin of the population of Avaris during the first half of
the second millennium BC. ʻThe Hyksos Enigmaʼ project of M. Bietak, as
principal investigator, and his associates aims to ‘reveal the origin of the
western Asiatic population’ of the Eastern Delta (https://thehyksosenigma
.oeaw.ac.at/about/, 05.08.2019). It seems that large-scale immigration is
assumed even before the analysis is conducted. In fact, in one interview
published on 5 February 2016, M. Bietak stated: ‘Certain events repeat them-
selves. Ancient history also knew massive flows of migration, and this is
something we are seeing today. I assume that 50 years from now
a considerable share of the European population will have oriental roots.
Perhaps one can hope that people will become acculturated and contribute to
a successful Europe of the future’ (https://scilog.fwf.ac.at/en, 05.08.2019). In
Section 2, we have seen that most of such assumptions are based on culture-
historical methodology.
Within this project, H. Schutkowski and his team work on skeletal remains from
the site and on stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses. At a conference of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists in March 2019, N. Maaranen,

S. R. Zakrzewski and H. Schutkowski (2019) presented the results of their study of
dental material of ninety-six individuals from three areas of Tell el-Dabca. The
results were compared with ancient Egyptian cemeteries at Lisht (c.2000–1800 BC),
Thebes (c.2130–1800 BC), and Qurna (c.1300–1190 BC). According to the results of
this study, the material from Tell el-Dabca is distant from the material from Lisht,
Thebes, and Qurna, 6–14 times more than standard deviation. They refer to the
material from Tell el-Dabca as Hyksos and argue that, based on these results, they
were not of Egyptian origin. However, none of the burials from Tell el-Dabca is
a royal burial, so the use of the term Hyksos is not justified: it is clear that it is used
here as an ethnic designation for the entire population of Avaris. Furthermore, the
results of this study show some difference between the material from Lisht, Qurna,
and Thebes. In fact, the difference between Lisht and Thebes is greater than the
difference between Qurna and Thebes. This is not surprising considering the
geographical distribution of these sites (Figure 1) and the chronological range of
the samples. Dental material differs greatly from Avaris on one side and Lisht,
Qurna, and Thebes on the other, but one should consider a wide range of possibil-
ities for such differences, including, among others, different life conditions in the
Delta, and the fact that it is closer to the Levant. Its population must have been
different than that of the south throughout much of ancient Egyptian history
(Kemp, 2018: 50), but to what extent it can be said that it was not Egyptian is
a matter which cannot be answered using such methods.
The most recent study of strontium isotopes ratios from human tooth enamel
was conducted on seventy-five individuals from three different cemeteries at
Tell el-Dabca, out of which thirty-six were from pre-Hyksos rule and thirty-five
from Hyksos rule contexts. The results showed that more than half spent their
lives outside of the Nile Delta, displaying a wide range of values and more
ʻimmigrantsʼ in the pre-Hyksos period, with more women non-locals than men.
However, it was not possible to exactly pinpoint the origin of the non-locals
(Stantis et al., 2020). Still, we have to bear in mind that a study of seventy-five
individuals out of which sixty-seven come from area A/II, seven from area F/I,
and one from area A/I, can hardly be representative of the entire population of
the site of some 260 ha and some 1,000 tombs excavated until now. An
additional problem is that, although at the beginning of the paper Stantis et al.
stress that they will use the term Hyksos to refer to the ruling class only, at the
end of the paper, based on the results of the study, they state that ʻin combination
with previous archaeological evidence, this research supports the concept that
the Hyksos were not an invading force occupying this city and the upper Nile
Delta, but an internal group of people who gained power in a system with which
they were already familiarʼ (Stantis et al., 2020: 9). Again, we have the equation
of the Hyksos with the ʻpeopleʼ inhabiting the site, now referring to the non-
local women whose exact origin could actually not be pinpointed.
5 Concluding Remarks
The question of identity, whether racial in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century or ethnic in the later twentieth and twenty-first century, continues to
occupy Egyptologists. Contemporary Egyptology faces the same problems in
studying ethnic identity in the past as other historical disciplines, no matter if
they are based on texts, images, material culture, or their various combin-
ations. Even those who did not or do not deal with these questions, classify, for
example, the archaeological material such as pottery (into e.g. Egyptian and
Nubian) and use it as evidence of actual foreign presence. It is rarely con-
sidered that although foreigners could have been there, the foreign material
culture can be used by locals too, without them necessarily aspiring to foreign
identity. Section 3 demonstrated the difficulties which go together with such
arguments.
Ancient Egypt presents us with an excellent case for studying ethnogenesis
as defined in Section 3, a concept unfortunately rarely used by Egyptologists.
Following S. Jones, ethnic identities are based on shifting, situational, sub-
jective identifications of self and others, rooted in daily practices and histor-
ical experiences, and subject to transformations and discontinuity (Jones,
1997: 13). Numerous examples discussed in this Element demonstrate this.
Identity in ancient Egypt was not as fixed as primordialists would argue. The
old Egyptological idea of a single Egyptian culture with single common ethnic
identity, language, and shared values cannot be accounted for in all contexts
(Baines, 1996: 362; contra Kemp, 2018: 24–5, who lists these elements in
defining ancient Egyptians as a nation). A person of foreign descent could
become Egyptian no matter his or her background. This has led some authors
to argue that ‘foreignness’ loses its applicability in the setting in which people
of foreign origin who lived in Egypt adapted to the social and cultural system
of their host country (Schneider, 2010: 144; also Budka, 2012).
The long history of ancient Egypt and the various examples provided in
this Element teach us that an essentialist notion of ethnic identity simply does
not hold ground. What it meant to be Egyptian or a foreigner changed
significantly and numerous times over at least three millennia. It was negoti-
ated and defined in contrast not to diverse people of foreign origin who lived
in Egypt and spoke Egyptian, for example, but to people who lived outside of
Egypt, not speaking the Egyptian language, and even possibly sometimes
threatening the land of Egypt. This is why both the scientific racism discussed
in Section 2 and the third science revolution and its tools such as DNA and
isotope analyses discussed in Section 4, fail to give answers to ethnic identity
being that it is socially constructed (Lucy, 2005: 93). We have to differentiate
between biological proximity-divergence and ethnic identity, as the former is
‘a result of long history of interactions that occur between that person’s
ancestors and earlier natural and sociocultural environments’ (Buzon, 2008:
166). Although ‘groups with similar cranial shape tend to be related more
closely to each other than groups that show more divergence’ (Buzon, 2008:
166), these similarities and differences are not ethnic differentia specifica.
Feeling as a member of and identifying with an ethnic groups is not some-
thing written in bone, blood, or DNA. These analyses are certainly more than
useful in studying ethnicity because they provide us with valuable informa-
tion on origin, descent, biological kinship, and mobility. But as texts and
iconography teach us, foreignness read through these analyses can mean
little, because it was not an obstacle to self-identification or outside recogni-
tion of membership to a certain ethnic group. Studying cultures which left
rich textual and visual record behind, such as ancient Egypt, provides a nice
balance to the approaches relying solely on skeletal remains of ancient
people, like in the case of prehistory.
The stereotypical, rhetorical, and ideological representations of foreigners
in texts and iconography are a reference to the process of self-definition and do
not target the inhabitants of Egypt of different descent, as long as they are
loyal to the king. Cultural practices of foreign origin can be used to express
status rather than ethnic identity and can as such slowly but surely inspire
others to adopt them (Schneider, 2003). After some time, they become an
integral part of one’s own unconscious daily (habitus) or occasional practices,
losing the allure of foreignness. This is why foreign material culture and
practices documented in the archaeological record cannot be interpreted in
a culture-historical manner as evidence of foreign presence using the pots
equals people premise. This does not mean that people do not move and leave
archaeological traces of their movement or presence. Some of these move-
ments leave archaeological traces, others do not. Yet, recognising a foreign
burial in ancient Egypt does not mean studying ethnic identity. We should
always remember that the dead are buried by the community of the living, so
that those who might have tried to change their ways still got buried in the way
the community they once belonged to wanted them to be buried. This was
probably one of the reasons textual sources indicate that ancient Egyptians
preferred being buried at home (Section 1).
One should, however, not be pessimistic and depart from any attempt at
studying ethnic identity through material culture. In fact, material culture is
crucial for expressing ethnic identity. None of the afore-mentioned people of

foreign origin could express either their foreignness, or their Egyptianness
without material culture (e.g. dress, funerary stelae, tombs). However, what
culture-historical archaeology fails to recognise is that not all material culture
is used by a group or recognised by another group as an ethnic marker. What
we use to group ourselves or differentiate ourselves from the others can be
used by others to mark us, but they can also mark us with that which we do not
recognise as a differentiating feature. Pottery and culinary practices can be
adopted or abandoned. People can also try things out, sometimes out of
curiosity, continue to use them, or abandon them completely. But that does
not mean that foreigners were not around; they could have been, sometimes
longer, sometimes occasionally.
Egyptology benefits a lot from rich textual and iconographic sources. The
danger is, however, in insufficient dialogue between Egyptologists specialising in
philology and historiography, and those specialising in archaeology and art
history. Even more dangerous is the lack of awareness of discussions on ethnicity
outside of Egyptology, namely in the broader archaeological world and other
disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology. Egyptologists rarely stressed that
‘what we must do is try to avoid applying inappropriate modern distinctions to the
ancient situation’ (Johnson, 1999: 211). In Section 1, we have seen that ancient
Egyptian identity was never ‘national’, although in certain periods there is
evidence of ‘imperial identity’ of the elitist segment of Egyptian society (Moers
2016, 701). The need to rethink our preconceived notions of identity, the concepts
we employ to interpret the past, and the way we understand material culture is
gaining increased recognition. T. Schneider labelled these efforts ‘trans-
Egyptology of 21st century’ (Schneider, 2018: 246). However, while preliminary
moves have been made in the last two decades or so, at least where the topic
covered by this Element is concerned, still only a handful of scholars participate
in these discussions. Most Egyptologists are instead what some archaeologists
call ‘culture happy’, meaning that they still work within the frame of culture-
historical archaeology (see Section 2). Instead, starting from the notion of
Egyptian identity being very locally bound, we should ask ourselves in which
context this locally bound identity can be elevated to sentiments of belonging to
a land or a people. It seems that this is in the case of supra-local and supra-regional
mobility (Moers, 2016: 699) or tensions (Sections 1 and Section 3).
This Element has made an attempt to fill gaps in communication between
studies of ethnic identity both inside and outside Egyptology, and those not
dealing with these questions, by providing an overview of both past and current
approaches, problems, and challenges Egyptologists face in studying ethnicity.
Readers still interested in this topic should further venture into the rich world of
Egyptological studies of foreigners and ethnicity, and the even richer world of
numerous and varied ancient Egyptian sources. The sources (textual, icono-
graphic, and archaeological) can be surely read and studied to learn more than
has been said here and, if this is the outcome, my goal with this Element is
accomplished.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all of the people who discussed this topic with me over the past
years and as there are many I can only do justice by expressing my gratitude to
the few of them with whom I had most intensive discussions: Angelika
Lohwasser, Irene Forstner-Müller, Wolfgang Müller, Constance von Rüden,
Dietrich Raue, Bettina Bader, and Christian Knoblauch. I also thank Andrea
Sinclair for proofreading the English of my manuscript and encouraging this
debate, and Astrid Hassler for her help with the graphics.
I would like to thank Juan Carlos Moreno García, Gianluca Miniaci, and
Anna Stevens for inviting me to contribute to the series Elements: Ancient
Egypt in Context with this text and for being patient with my slight delay. I am
also grateful to two anonymous reviewers who provided useful comments
which helped in producing a more focused and readable text.
I dedicate this text to my brother Nikola Matić.
Ancient Egypt in Context
Gianluca Miniaci
University of Pisa
Gianluca Miniaci is Associate Professor in Egyptology at the University of Pisa, Honorary
Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL–London, and Chercheur associé at the
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. He is currently co-director of the archaeological
mission at Zawyet Sultan (Menya, Egypt). His main research interest focuses on the social
history and the dynamics of material culture in the Middle Bronze Age Egypt and its
interconnections between the Levant, Aegean, and Nubia.
Juan Carlos Moreno García

CNRS, Paris
Juan Carlos Moreno García (PhD in Egyptology, 1995) is a CNRS senior researcher at the
University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, as well as lecturer on social and economic history of
ancient Egypt at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He has
published extensively on the administration, socio-economic history, and landscape
organization of ancient Egypt, usually in a comparative perspective with other civilizations
of the ancient world, and has organized several conferences on these topics.
Anna Stevens
University of Cambridge and Monash University
Anna Stevens is a research archaeologist with a particular interest in how material culture
and urban space can shed light on the lives of the non-elite in ancient Egypt. She is Senior
Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Assistant
Director of the Amarna Project (both University of Cambridge).
About the Series

The aim of this Elements series is to offer authoritative but accessible overviews
of foundational and emerging topics in the study of ancient Egypt, along with
comparative analyses, translated into a language comprehensible to non-specialists.
Its authors will take a step back and connect ancient Egypt to the world around, bringing
ancient Egypt to the attention of the broader humanities community and leading
Egyptology in new directions.
Ancient Egypt in Context
Elements in the Series

Seeing Perfection: Ancient Egyptian Images beyond Representation
Rune Nyord
Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs: Past and Present Approaches
in Egyptology
Uroš Matić
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What are some of the approaches to ethnic identity discussed in Egyptology?

What are some of the approaches to ethnic identity discussed in Egyptology?

ancient Egypt

ETHNIC IDENTITIES IN THE

Past and Present Approaches

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Past and Present Approaches in Egyptology

Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context

Keywords: ancient Egypt, ethnicity, culture-historical archaeology, habitus,

© Uroš Matić 2020

2 From Race to Culture and People: Egyptology

3 Ethnic Identity: Recent Perspectives in Egyptology 34

4 Third Science Revolution 53

a) How did ancient Egyptians understand their own collective identity in

approaching ancient Egypt? We need to critically reﬂect on the concepts we

1.1 The Categories of Evidence

3 Foreign Material Culture in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Egyptian

difﬁcult to differentiate between an object imported through exchange and trade on

1. Ancient Egypt designates a civilisation of ancient northern Africa primarily

2. Race designates biological variations inscribed with explanatory value.

3. Archaeological culture was best deﬁned by Australian born archaeologist

4. Ethnicity is a concept with a complex history (Jones, 1997; McInerney,

difference in opposition to others (Jones, 1997: 128). According to Jones ‘ethni-

5. Habitus is a term primarily associated in sociology with P. Bourdieu (1930–

1.3 Being Egyptian and Being Foreign: Over 3000 Years

Where language is concerned, non-Egyptians were considered by Egyptians

Egyptian art used skin colour to differentiate between Egyptians (reddish),

2 From Race to Culture and People: Egyptology of the

Craniometry was also utilised by other, better-known Egyptologists.

Figure 3 Cranial measures of different races according to W. M. F. Petrie

2.1.2 The Hamitic Question

The concerns with racial differentiation in early archaeology of Egypt and

Figure 4 Distribution of different races in Europe and North

by light-skinned Hamites and not dark-skinned Negroes (Matić, 2018a: 31).

2.1.3 Scientiﬁc Racism and Ancient Egyptian Depictions of Foreigners

Authors such as Morton and Gliddon approached ancient Egyptian iconography as

Comparing Egyptian representations of captive Nubians from New Kingdom

Figure 5 Plantation scene from the tomb of Djehutyhotep, Debeira-East in

2.2 Egyptology, Culture-Historical Archaeology and Ethnic Identity

Figure 6 King and Queen of Punt, mortuary temple of Hatshepsut

Another Nubian archaeological culture was recognised by Petrie in cemetery

1. The ancient Egyptian term Mḏ3.yw (inhabitants of land or region Mḏ3 in

2. The same tracing of ethnicity backwards using an ethnonym is also found in

3. An archaeological culture which has received increased scholarly attention

c.1650–1550 BC. Hyksos is a Greek term used by the ﬁrst-century AD Jewish

2.3 A Hidden Theory

Figure 7 Plan of the cemetery in area cEzbet Helmi, Tell el-Dabca

3 Ethnic Identity: Recent Perspectives in Egyptology

3.1 Primordial Approach

to folkloric repositories of distinctive values and cultural attributes (Moreno

3.2 Instrumentalist Approach

However, Cole further argues that he understands markers of ethnic groups as

a way, Arnold’s understanding of the processes occurring in the Eastern Delta

3.3 Topos and Mimesis: A Structuralist Approach

3.4 Egyptianness and Foreignness: Habitus and Ethnic Identity

Most recently, K. Liszka uses habitus as a tool in her study of dry-stone

3.5 Postcolonial Theory and Ethnic Identity