We are pleased to announce that our next two lectures will be offered by Uroš Matić!
Lecture Details: he New Kingdom Egyptian conquest of the Levant and Nubia during the 16th and 15th centuries BCE was memorialized through private and royal inscriptions, as well as visual representations of battles on temple walls and the depiction of tribute and war spoils in the tombs of state officials. Furthermore, these campaigns inspired historical fiction and literary narratives that were orally transmitted, written down, copied, and read. Some motifs in the battle representations on temple walls have clear parallels in these literary stories, while others do not. This suggests the existence of
deliberate compositional strategies, such as visual quotations and allusions, necessitating an understanding of the textual and visual discourses of war in New Kingdom Egypt as intertextually
constructed.
This paper analyzes the intertextuality of textual and visual representations of war-related violence in the New Kingdom alongside its historical fiction, focusing on the gender dynamics of the protagonists. It demonstrates that the deliberate feminization of foreign enemies in royal inscriptions and temple representations finds direct parallels in the demasculinization of foreigners in literary stories. Both the discourse of war and historical fiction portray ancient Egyptian men as more masculine than foreign men, framing the imperial relationship between ancient Egypt and conquered territories as analogous to the asymmetrical power dynamics between men and women in ancient Egypt.
Speaker Details: Uroš Matić is an assistant professor at the Institute for Ancient History and the Ancient Near Eastern Studies, University of Innsbruck in Austria and a lecturer at the Institute for Classics, University of Graz in Austria. His main expertise is in war and violence in ancient Egypt, ancient Egyptian interrelations, settlement archaeology and gender studies in archaeology. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Münster in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Angelika Lohwasser and Prof. Anthony J. Spalinger and received two prizes for this work (Philippika prize of Harrassowitz in 2018 and Best Publication Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2020). He held the P.R.I.M.E fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2018 to 2019 and received the grants of the Foundation for Postgraduates of Egyptology in Vienna in 2016 and 2022. From 2019 to 2023 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. During this period he specialized in Early Dynastic to First Intermediate Period Upper Egyptian pottery. In 2024 he was a scholar in residence at the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology. Starting in March 2025 he will join the College for Social Sciences and Humanities of the Ruhr University Alliance based in Essen Germany as a visiting Senior Fellow. He was co-chair of the Archaeology and Gender in Europe (AGE) community of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) from 2016 to 2019. He has over 100 publications, the most recent being the monograph Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2021) and the edited volumes Beautiful Bodies. Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in the Past (Oxbow Books, 2022) and Bodies that Mattered. Ancient Egyptian Corporealities (Sidestone Press, forthcoming in 2025, with Dina Serova).
This lecture will be held in-person and on Zoom
Emerson Hall, Room 108
(29 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138, Harvard University)
Online registration is Required: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/t--tK23ZRvqY37JnE3I0tg?fbclid=IwY2xjawJTc-pleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHTiRSWwlwNVOF7Vi38s_WRf3QDHbE6ZwTyVSOSvYGhDm8Kpqzrjyv9vyRg_aem_oU-Am4pbCZrh9y9-AuomDw#/registration