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Not Marginal, But Marginalised. The ‘Pan-Grave’ Archaeological Culture, Pharaonic Egypt, and Egyptology

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Published/Copyright: July 12, 2022
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Abstract

This paper focusses on the so-called “Pan-Grave” archaeological culture, and the extent to which communities attributed to it can or should be considered “marginal” based on the available archaeological and historical evidence. It will be argued that communities that archaeologists identify as “Pan-Grave” were likely to have been small and hence a minority in terms of population size, but that the wide distribution of evidence suggests that “Pan-Grave culture” was a recognisable component of the ancient Egyptian socio-cultural landscape. The frequency and variety of evidence for contact and exchange between the Pan-Grave and Egyptian cultural spheres points towards close social ties rather than Pan-Grave being marginal to the ancient Egyptian “core”. At the same time, it is proposed that Pan-Grave culture—and Nubian cultures in general—have been marginalised by Egyptology as an academic discipline, which has a tradition of implicitly (and explicitly) using ancient rhetoric to justify its own conception of ancient Egyptian dominance. It is also argued that a re-framing of “Pan-Grave” communities as an integral part of the cultural fabric of pharaonic Egypt would encourage Egyptology as a discipline to question its own perception of what defines “Egyptian” from both ancient and academic perspectives.


Corresponding author: Aaron de Souza, Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Hollandstraße 11-13, 1020, Wien, Austria, E-mail:

Funding source: European Commission, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Award Identifier / Grant number: MSCA 796050

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was conducted within the framework of the InBetween project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 796050. The author thanks Susan Cohen and Jana Mynářová for the invitation to participate in the ‘Outside the Pale’ research group, and to all of the group members for many interesting knowledge exchanges. Thank you also to the peer-reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

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Published Online: 2022-07-12
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

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