"Who wears a kilt like men and a sash like women"

Negotiating foreignness, gender, and the body in New Kingdom representations of Near Eastern goddesses

Abstract

Egypt’s imperial age saw the emergence of new deities within the country’s monumental and literary repertoires. Some were of Near Eastern origin, while others were Egyptian creations inspired by perceptions of Near Eastern cultures. Among these were the goddesses Qadesh, Astarte, and Anat, whose bodily characterisations in visual and textual media exhibit features that are unusual compared with Egyptian norms of gendered representation. We might hypothesise that such figures were uniquely placed to disrupt convention, being doubly peripheral as both ‘foreign’ and feminine within an androcentric representational system. This article evaluates the utility of Marie Louise Stig Sørensen’s model of gender negotiation for understanding the processes that produced these representations. The paper first outlines Sørensen’s argument that gender norms are produced by finding agreements between different understandings of roles and identities. It then discusses the origins of Qadesh, Astarte, and Anat, interrogating the nature of the ‘foreignness’ they might embody. Their characterisations are then examined within a select corpus of visual and textual sources: Qadesh’s triadic stelae, the literary text Astarte and the Sea, and a mythic precedent to a magic spell called Anat, Seth, and the Seed of Pre. While these representations are indeed unusual, traces of more standard dynamics are nonetheless discernible. Drawing on Sørensen, we might describe this process as a negotiation between message and medium, between the intent to create exceptional, exoticised personas and the culturally determined vocabulary available to do so.