FAST Lecture | Engraving One’s Name in the Wadi Hammamat Quarries: From Spatial Dynamics to Visual Discourses

Located halfway between the Nile and the Red Sea, Wadi Hammamat is the modern name given to a section of this ancient Eastern Desert road where greywacke and siltstone quarries were exploited from the Predynastic period onward. In addition to a current project which aims to (re)edit the rich epigraphic material uncovered in situ, approximately 400 pre-Late Period inscriptions, this corpus has recently been re-explored in terms of writing practices. Through a multidimensional perspective, Vincent Morel will give some new insights into what these engravings “tell” beyond the strictly linguistic level. Focusing on the Old Kingdom material (3rd millennium BCE), he will make use of an original heuristic approach, associating material, visual, and (inter[icono])textual investigations, to better understand the intelligibility of the writing act itself, in a liminal place where the mere mortal could partake in the divine.

Please note, this lecture takes place at 12 p.m. Eastern.

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FAST lectures are free and open to the public.