Start   .   2023
Duration   .   24 meses
Principal Investigator   .   Inês Torres (CHAM)

Institutions

Main Research Unit

CHAM — Centro de Humanidades

Partnerships

American Research Center in Egypt - ARCE
Project «The Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (MAD-P)»

Death is a social phenomenon as much as it is a biological one. To the ancient Egyptians, survival after biological death could only be guaranteed through the preservation of one’s memory. Memory, on the other hand, was preserved through material culture: the tomb was the materialization of the deceased’s memory. ANTIGA MENTE is an interdisciplinary project that aims to investigate how memory was created and (re)negotiated through Egyptian funerary material culture.

ANTIGA MENTE hypothesises that tomb design was carefully considered by tomb owners to convey their own self constructed narrative(s) of remembrance for all eternity. It also hypothesises that, despite these attempts, tomb visitors were a diverse and heterogenous group who had their own agency and who (re)interpreted the tomb owner’s memorialisation narrative(s) in different ways. In order to understand how the tomb space influenced and contributed to the construction of one’s memory and remembrance, and how individual identity (such as gender, class, and lived experience) could influence the types of engagement(s) with the tomb, during this project we will collect data from a wide range of tombs, consisting on information about the architectural space, the texts and images carved on the walls of the tomb, and the statuary and other artefacts in it. All of these elements are seen here as conscious, structured mechanisms of persuasion in the production, construction, and negotiation of memory between the dead and the living, as well as among the living themselves

Goals

The goals of this exploratory project are threefold: to compile a corpus of non-royal tombs from the 3rd millennium BCE, both from regional cemeteries and those around the capital, Memphis, building an extensive database that will be the corner stone of the PI’s research; to initiate a preliminary study of this data within the framework of the subfields of Archaeology of Memory and Cognitive Archaeology; to establish partnerships with colleagues working in the field of neuro- and cognitive sciences, psychology, neuroaesthetics, and neuromarketing. By doing so, ANTIGA MENTE lays the ground for a larger project, which will be submitted for consideration to an ERC Starting Grant in 2025.