Non-elite bodies in the Old Kingdom

Towards a relational approach

Abstract

The human body has been a site of much theoretical reasoning in the social and cultural sciences since the 1970s. Egyptologists too have explored the rich evidence from ancient Egypt and placed bodies back in history. The bulk of the Egyptological research literature is focused on two- and three-dimensional representations that were predominantly produced and displayed in 'elite' contexts and on written evidence, such as healing instructions and ritual texts that exhibit little interest in situating bodies in a specific social milieu. This paper develops an alternative perspective and discusses evidence for bodies of the non-elite population. I adopt a relational approach to social modeling assuming that the social is a dynamic and context-bound process of positioning individuals relative to each other. My point of departure is a recently excavated non-elite cemetery at Zawyet Sultan. The discussion revolves around the positioning of bodies in changing iconographic and material contexts during the late fourth to the third millennia BCE. Bodies have a better potential than the terms 'individual' or 'person' for approaching the non-elite population of ancient Egypt because they raise questions on close social and physical relatedness that was presumably typical of non-elite contexts.