‘Subalternity’ relates to directions of research across the social and cultural sciences that engage with the views of disempowered groups and how they are represented in scholarship. I use the concept in this project to challenge elite-centred research into ancient Egypt and define alternative avenues through which to model early complex societies. Social evolution has been a major framework for comparative discussions of the rise and development of ‘civilizations’ (Trigger 2003; Yoffee 2005), but evolutionary thought has recently been critiqued because it has buttressed European colonial practices and ideologies – including archaeological research – and downplayed the role of human imagination, indigenous thought, and the diversity of social trajectories (Trümpler 2008; Effros, Lai 2018; Graeber, Wengrow 2021).
The study of ancient Egypt is a prime example. After the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, the development of Egyptology as an academic discipline abetted European hegemony over the interpretation of pharaonic Egypt, which in turn justified the large-scale removal of its monuments (Reid 2002; Reid 2015). Europe was deemed the heir of Egypt’s cultural memory and the “monumental discourse” of ancient Egypt was aligned with European traditions (Assmann 1988; 1992).
Narratives of social evolution and cultural memory are powerful concepts in global history, but for ancient Egypt they have long centred on an elite culture disconnected from its social contexts, both from the ancient past and from the history of Egypt after the Arab conquest. Alternative evidence has accumulated, as fieldwork moved from recording monuments to the excavation of settlements, low-status cemeteries, and prehistoric sites. But despite a growing body of evidence for everyday life and a more refined reading of ancient texts, elite culture has remained the preferred context for interpretation and still dominates perceptions of ancient Egypt, both within and outside academic Egyptology.
SUBALTERNEGY seeks to take a holistic view of early Egyptian society. The project explores how subaltern communities responded to hegemonic concepts and how they maintained, interpreted, or changed the prevailing social order.
The key case study for the project is an ancient Egyptian community cemetery located at Zawyet Sultan, near el-Minia in Middle Egypt. This and other low-status communities in ancient societies might have left few, if any, written records, but their members’ lived experiences are accessible through the material record. Using such evidence, the project asks, “Can the subaltern speak?”, a question originally raised by the postcolonial anthropologist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) and adopted in this project for a novel interpretation of Egyptian evidence. Ancient historians and archaeologists have observed that subaltern groups had to – or chose to – express themselves using modes employed by dominant groups, and therefore appear as marginalized in the source material and consequently in historiography. Yet they also recognize that dominant and subaltern concepts are interrelated rather than discrete bodies of thought and practice, and are therefore difficult to isolate from one another in the analysis (Zuchtriegel 2018; Courrier, Magalhães de Oliveira 2021; Thurston, Fernández-Diaz 2021). Identifying patterns of resistance plays an important role in subaltern studies, but responses to hegemonic imposition vary widely, to include co-optation, emulation, misinterpretation, and partial appropriation depending on the available means, and on the ability of the subaltern group to access knowledge and associated material culture.
SUBALTERNEGY builds on discussions of subalternity to reveal the ‘hidden’ agency and imaginative capacities existing within the wider population of early Egypt. It shows that social complexity reconfigured the lives of everyone in a society and, by embedding the record of ancient Egypt in debates of materiality (Miller 2005), that elite culture was not divorced from, but developed from and was constructed within, the complex realities of everyday life revealed by material culture.
Theoretical challenges relevant to the project become apparent in the terminology of social analysis. People at the lower end of the social hierarchy are often referred to by terms such as ‘commoners’, ‘non-elites’ or ‘peasants’, and are contrasted with the ‘elite culture’ that designates the ‘high-cultural complex’ produced for and consumed by ‘the elite’, imbued by high-status Western investigators with a veneer of glamour. Each of these terms evokes certain imaginative ruptures in the cohesion of society, and guides interpretations, but assumptions are rarely discussed in Egyptological social analysis (Grajetzki 2010). ‘Commoners’ appear in monumental display and administrative records as labourers or in service to high-status individuals, and it can be hypothesized that they were organised via households and lived, landless and economically dependent, in rural estates and villages. No such estate or village has yet been discovered, and the complex administrative arrangements known from documents pertaining to rural Egypt caution against simplified reconstructions (Eyre 1999; Allen 2002). Excavated towns and state-built settlements offer a glimpse of general living conditions, and some burial grounds contain simple and poorly equipped tombs that are typically attributed as belonging to lower-ranking individuals, yet most known cemeteries post-date the period to be studied in this project or belonged to a mid-ranking segment of the rural population (Seidlmayer 1990; Stevens 2018).
SUBALTERNEGY is in a unique position to advance research into low-status groups as it uses new data obtained from current excavations by the PI in the community cemetery of Hebenu, modern Zawyet Sultan, an ancient Egyptian town that functioned as a regional capital during the first period of political centralization in Northeast Africa, ca. 2700 to 2200 BC. The graves range from the sumptuous rock tombs of governors, built high up in the desert escarpment, to many simple shaft- and sub-surface burials located on the lower fringe of the desert slope.
The graves provide insights on multiple levels: hardly any burials of the simple sub-surface type are known from other sites; the find context at Zawyet Sultan offers the rare chance for a contextual analysis of low-status graves in the wider funerary landscape of an entire local community; the material culture and human remains – a type of ‘material’ that can now be studied with far more advanced technologies, such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), on-site X-raying with portable devices, and laser-scanning for Validated Entheses-based Reconstruction of Activity (VERA) analysis, than was possible in historical excavations – are excellently preserved; and the skeletons offer insights into both the physical realities of life and the cultural norms and values that guided post-mortem treatment. High-resolution evidence across ancient social strata will allow the project to directly assess the social organisation and symbolism of low-status groups against the better-known ideas and practices of ancient Egyptian ‘elites’.
The development of early complex societies is recognized as a major accelerator of social inequality, but it is difficult to determine the precise consequences of the process on those who experienced it. Most studies that embrace the remote past foreground systemic social change at the expense of exploring contextual inequality (Flannery, Marcus 2012; Scheidel 2017; Kohler, Smith 2019). SUBALTERNEGY is inherently contextual, in that it contributes to a vibrant field of research that seeks to reveal the dominant ideologies of the remote past by studying the complexities of everyday life through material culture. There is a rapidly growing body of research in World Archaeology that relates to life beyond ‘elites’ in early complex societies (Smith 2010; Hutson 2010; Bussmann, Helms 2020; Thurston, Fernández-Götz 2021).
This includes ancient Egypt, where developments in settlement and funerary archaeology, quantitative analyses, and new directions in social history have revealed diverse societal arrangements that were masked by the apparent unifying concepts of a socially dominant elite culture (Seidlmayer 1990; 2001; Alexanian 2001[2016]; Moreno-García 2014; Kemp 2013; 2018; Moeller 2016).
It is timely to consider the relevance of existing approaches to social and cultural analysis generally, and to early societal stratification particularly. SUBALTERNEGY takes up this challenge. Chronologically, it focusses on the Egyptian Old Kingdom, an historical period that initially saw the centralization of elites and the development of steep social hierarchies, and was later characterized by political fragmentation and the spread of elite culture into the provincial hinterland. The blossoming and collapse of the early ancient Egyptian state is a critical period in which to study how the lives of people at the lower end of the social hierarchy were embedded in societal change.
Zawyet Sultan 