Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt

by Lynn Meskell

Egypt looms large in the Western imagination. Whether it is our attraction to pharaonic art, the pyramids or practices of mummification, Egypts unique understanding of materiality speaks to us across space and time. Is it because the ancient Egyptians fetishized material objects that we find their culture captivating today? And what exactly do Egyptian remains tell us about biography, embodiment, memory, materiality, and the self? Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt takes New Kingdom Egypt (1539-1070 BC) as its starting point and considers how excavated objects reveal the complex ways that ancient Egyptians experienced their material world. From life to death, the material world instantiated, reflected and influenced social life and existence for ancient Egyptians. Thus, in Meskells unique approach to the materiality and sensuousness of subjects and objects, we uncover the philosophical, spiritual and human meanings embedded in these cultural artefacts. Meskells book explores the fundamental existential questions that not only preoccupied ancient Egyptians, but continue to fascinate people today. What is the essence of persons and things? How might we understand the situated experiences of material life, the constitution of the object world and its shaping of human experience? How might objects successfully mediate between worlds? In the final analysis, Meskell moves forward through time and examines the consumption and appreciation of these Egyptian material objects in the contemporary world. Materiality is our physical engagement with the world, our medium for inserting ourselves into the fabric of that world and our way of constituting and shaping culture in an embodied and external sense. From that perspective it is very much the domain of anthropology and archaeology.Drawing on a wide range of objects, artefacts, and artwork, from Valley of the Kings through to Las Vegas, Meskell provides an elegant analysis of the aesthetics of ancient Egyptian material culture

Genres: History, Material Culture

260 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2004

Reviews

[Alexander Jolley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is arguing that objects in ancient Egypt were not static matter; rather, they were active agents preserved in memory, whose primary transmission is from ancestor worship and an alignment with the divine, which carried with them meaning across generations and divinity. 

Objects were used by Egyptians to maintain cultural memory across generations. Heirlooms and funerary goods circulated across generations and gained more value with their reuse. These objects become agents of familial continuity, transmitting relationships across the living and the dead. Thus, the objects had a sense of agency in the world and the world above. 

Statues and textiles were also used as representations, but they were not symbolic representations, as the author argues, but divine objects in and of themselves. Ancient Egyptians reacted to them as living Gods, and they actively participated in communal and religious life. It derived its meaning both from the materiality and the ritual that accompanied it.