Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces - Miroslav Bárta
Visitors’ Graffiti: Traces of a Re-Appropriation of Sacred Spaces and a Demonstration of Literacy in the Landscape
Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces - Miroslav Bárta
Hana Navratilova [+]
University of Reading
Hana Navrátilová is an Egyptologist and historian with research interest in the graffiti of ancient Egypt during the New Kingdom. Her academic interests include the New Kingdom, Egyptian historiography, and the history of Egyptology, especially the international networks formed by scholars in the period between the 1920s and 1970s. More recently she has undertaken research for a variety of projects at the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, where she also worked on the Topographical Bibliography. Since 2011 she had been involved in the recording and publication of visitors’ graffiti in the pyramid complex of Senwosret III at Dahshur (Egypt) on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Description
The visitors’ graffiti corpus from Memphis and neighbouring areas includes texts from the archaeological sites of Abusir, Saqqara, Dahshur; and the site of Maidum near Fayyum oasis. The corpus consists of almost 400 texts of varied length. The texts are placed within recognised sacred spaces of royal funerary complexes and sun temples.They are also part of a wider landscape of the necropolis. Using mainly Saqqara and Dahshur material, the paper aims at suggesting a contextualisation of the graffiti within a broader sacred landscape of Memphis. Graffiti production might have been motivated by different aspects of religious experience as well as cultural memory.