The Writing's on the Wall (but you probably can't read it, unless you're good with hieroglyphs)

My classmate Cailin posted a cool blog about a necropolis in the ancient kingdom of Kush which neighbours Egypt. The people there built funerary monuments that seem to be hybrids between pyramids and tumulus’ (tumuli?). The part of her blog that really caught my attention though was the archaeologists who worked there found inscriptions wishing grandma good meals in the afterlife.  That reminded me of some very cool graffiti from the builders who worked on the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

Some of the ancient graffiti found deep inside the Great Pyramid Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/who-built-the-pyramids.html).

I love ancient graffiti because it is one of the few glimpses we get of ‘real’ people. The graffiti by the pyramid builders, such as an inscription by one of the worker gangs identifying themselves as ‘the Drunks (or the Drunkards) of Menkaure’, breathes life back into the ancient stones of these monuments. I think sometimes when we are looking at monuments from so far in the past, especially monuments like the pyramids that have been assimilated and incorporated into popular culture; we forget that they are graves.  Even the powerful pharaohs were people who loved and were loved and while their funerals and funerary monuments undoubtedly had important socio-political functions they were probably emotionally important to the people who mourned them as well.

This week we have been learning about how different cultures understand or categorize the lifecourse. For simplicity’s sake, the lifecourse is basically different stages an individual goes through in life such as childhood, adolescence, etc. I found the discussions we had in class about the lifecourse really got me thinking about how individuals experienced life in past societies. I suppose I tend to get so caught up with the material culture side of archaeology; C14 dates, grave goods, stone monuments, etc. that  in a strange way I almost dehumanize the people I’m trying to learn about. Archaeology is all about reconstructing social organization, and subsistence patterns, and funerary practices, and the list goes on and on. I think it’s really important to look at a smaller scale sometimes even though reconstruction of individual lives from the archaeological record is often not possible; we can at least imagine some of those little moments in life that the archaeological record remains largely silent about. I mean, perhaps a bunch of rowdy ancient Egyptians builders got drunk and urinated on the partially constructed tomb of their illustrious pharaoh while he was in bed restlessly counting sheep? cattle? camels? because he had lost at Senet that evening.

Queen Nefertari Playing Senet, Tomb of Nefertari;
ca. 1279–1213 B.C. (http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/100005246)