11:00 am – 1:00 pm
The Italian Academy, 5th-floor seminar room
Vincent Morel
Yale University
Crafting Memory and Place: Pharaonic Rock Inscriptions and the Rhetoric of Space in Egypt’s Eastern Desert
Since the time of early modern explorers, extensive efforts have been devoted to collecting and documenting Pharaonic expedition inscriptions across Egypt’s Eastern Desert. These inscriptions, found at mining and quarrying sites as well as along desert roads, have been the subject of seminal publications that assemble significant corpora of epigraphic material from diverse archaeological sites, extending from the central Eastern Desert to Lower Nubia. Traditionally, these rock inscriptions have been studied out-of-context, treated as “abstract objects” primarily to refine our understanding of Pharaonic expeditions—their chronology, prosopography, and logistical organization. In line with recent trends in ancient graffiti studies advocating for a more holistic and integrative approach, this lecture explores methodologies for analyzing and interpreting rock inscriptions as artifacts that played a meaningful role in the physical context of their desert location. Through case studies from the Old and Middle Kingdom (3rd and early 2nd millennia BCE) at various sites, we will examine what these texts reveal about ancient experiences of desert spaces and how such markings actively “landscaped” their environments.
