Upcoming Events

AIA Local Lecture:  Beyond Thebes:  Local Identity and Power in Early New Kingdom Egypt

Speaker:   Prof. Emily Smith-Sangster, College of the Holy Cross

Time and Date:  6:30-7:30pm Monday, September 28th

Location:  TBA

About:  Studies of identity in the Egyptian New Kingdom have long focused on Thebes, often treating "Theban" as interchangeable with "Egyptian" identity as a whole. This talk challenges that assumption by taking a more local approach, viewing identity as shaped by specific places, time periods, and communities, rather than as something that a single place and period can essentialize. Using the early 18th Dynasty Ahmose Cemetery at South Abydos, first discovered by the Abydos South Project in 2023, as a case study, this talk explores how a non-royal and non-elite community at Abydos manufactured and understood their local identities during a period of major political change and cultural shift. By examining burial customs, grave goods, and intangible culture such as landscape, this talk shows that while some Theban traditions of the early New Kingdom were adopted in Abydos, the community that made up the Ahmose Cemetery was not simply imitating the capital. Instead, this community developed its own local ways of expressing belonging, memory, and identity. In doing so, this study reframes Egyptian identity not as fixed or uniform across the country, but as a collection of flexible and self-formed local identities, which require close analysis of individual sites to more fully understand. 

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