ARCE NY: Shabtis for the Nubians: Material Colonization and Local Identities in the New Kingdom Egyptian Empire

RSVP to arcenychapter@gmail.com. You will be emailed a Zoom link to attend the lecture. Space is limited to 100 participants. 

Lecture Information: 

The Egyptian New Kingdom colonization of Nubia materialized in different ways on local ground. Among Egyptian imperial strategies to establish their power in Nubia, a global objectscape comprised of a series of Egyptian-style items spread throughout Nubia. Early scholars interpreted the substitution of previous Nubian material culture for Egyptian-style objects as evidence of the acculturation of Nubian populations. However, looking at shabtis allows us to realize the different social roles performed by these foreign objects in local contexts in Nubia. This talk will focus on the shabti corpus from New Kingdom Nubia and examine the different roles performed by these objects, including the expression of local identities through objects originally aimed to materialize foreign colonial rule. 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Rennan Lemos recently completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC-funded Diverse Nile Project at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He has many years of excavation experience in Egypt and Sudan and most recently co-edited Current Perspectives in Sudanese and Nubian Archaeology, published by Archaeopress.