When: May 17-19, 2023
Where: Mainz, Germany (hybrid: in-person and online)
Submission deadline: October 14, 2022
Dear colleagues,
We are delighted to announce the upcoming conference Looking Beyond the Text: Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt, to be held May 17–19, 2023, at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.
In recent years, Egyptian philology has begun to embrace more contextualized approaches to Egyptian texts, which seek to re-embed ancient manuscripts in their social, material, and historical contexts. This paradigm shift serves as a corrective to the field’s long-standing tendency to study Egyptian texts through reconstructed “original” versions, with great focus on the content of the text and its author’s intended meaning, and little consideration of the manuscripts and the contexts in which they were made. Thanks to several groundbreaking works of scholarship (e.g. Parkinson 2009, Hagen 2012, Ragazzoli 2019) on reading ancient Egyptian texts in context, the field of Egyptian philology has begun to move away from discipline-internal frameworks and toward more theoretically engaged and self-critical approaches. Along with these broad disciplinary shifts, the field’s primary object of study is also changing: philologists’ interest is moving away from authors and toward copyists and readers–in short, toward scribes.
Scribes were foundational to the creation, transmission, and reception of ancient Egyptian textual traditions. Likewise, those textual traditions were essential to scribal culture and identity, which was based not only on scribes’ intellectual activities, but also in the bodily practices and experiences of writing. Text, copyist, and the act of copying are thus inextricably intertwined, and the study of one illuminates the study of the others.
In this conference, we aim to build bridges between varied approaches to the study of ancient Egyptian texts, from traditional philology’s interest in the text for and in itself, to more anthropological interest in the text as a source of insight into scribal traditions and ancient Egyptian social and cultural life. Combining these approaches sheds new light on the production, transmission, and reception of ancient Egyptian texts and the key role of scribes in these processes. For instance, studies of scribal practices such as colophons, dipping, emendations, and other paratextual marks have illuminated not only copying procedures, but also the scribal profession, its traditions, and its evolution throughout the pharaonic period. Moreover, consideration of how a particular manuscript was copied–by and for whom, in what location, using what objects and gestures–can reveal aspects of the copyist’s reception of the text. Considering ancient Egyptian texts alongside the identity and practices of the scribes who read, copied, and passed them down allows us to fully (re)contextualize those texts within ancient Egyptian intellectual, social, and cultural life.
We invite abstracts for papers of 20–25 minutes. Papers may explore any document from pharaonic Egypt written in ancient Egyptian, in any script, on any writing support; there is no restriction regarding genre or period. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- New approaches to scribal education and curriculum
- Excerpting practices, compilation, intertextuality
- Productive and reproductive transmission of texts
- Construction, conceptions, circulation, and transmission of textual genres by scribes
- The role of scribes in the reception of texts and genres
- New/Material philology, paratext, and the material traces of copying and other scribal practices
- Interactions between textual genre, layout, script, and medium, as well as ergonomics of the medium
- Paleography, handwriting, and traces of individual writers, including considerations of ‘controlled writing’ (écriture contrôlée) and ‘personal writing’ (écriture personnelle)
Abstracts were selected through blind review in November 2022.