LECTURE | ‘Egyptian’ or ‘Nubian’? Towards a more nuanced view of ancient cultural diversity.

The pharaohs liked to draw clear boundaries around what they considered ‘Egyptian’, and those ancient perspectives persist in modern Egyptology. The First Cataract of the Nile is generally seen as the boundary is between ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia, but the division is more than just geographical. Grave, objects, and even people are labelled as ‘Nubian’, even if they come from within the limits of pharaonic Egypt. But why do we make such distinctions? And how accurate are they? This lecture demonstrates the problems that come with such clear divisions and highlights the challenges that arise upon asking new questions of historical, artistic, and archaeological evidence. Traditional boundaries will be blurred, and more nuanced perspectives will be encouraged. Guest Speaker: Aaron de Souza (PhD Macquarie 2017) is an archaeologist specialising in Nubian material culture of the Second Millennium BCE, and his research takes an object-based approach to the complex inter- and intra-cultural contacts that took place across the greater Nile Valley. He is currently a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and prior to this he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, also at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, funded by the European Commission (2019–2020). Aaron has worked with a number of excavation projects in Egypt, most notably at Tell Edfu, Hierakonpolis, Elephantine, Aswan, Dendara and Helwan, in addition to grant-funded museum-based research projects in Sweden, the UK, the USA, and Italy. He is also a founding editor of the online journal, Interdisciplinary Egyptology, hosted by the University of Vienna.