The Ancient Egyptians, a literate society which recorded so much of its world in wonderfully preserved imagery and texts, appear to be easily accessible to us. This is true, but only up to a point: it is the voices and depictions of wealthy and powerful adult men that come down to us, and hence it is their worldview that represents Ancient Egypt to us, even though they were the small minority. Tomb scenes, for example, are deceptive: they are those of the elite or ‘middle classes’, and representations of ordinary people serve the purpose of providing the deceased with what he needed in the afterlife. The happy, industrious peasants, artisans and servants seem to have no lives apart from their function within the tomb images, and neither do the wives or children who loyally but silently attend their husbands and fathers.
Egyptologists are now redressing this neglect, as the course will show. So what can give us a more truthful picture of the lives of ordinary folk? Archaeology shows how everyday work was carried out, and there are very rare instances of literacy, as at Deir el-Bahri, the settlement of the royal-tomb builders. From other places, laws, records of legal disputes, contracts, wills and satirical texts can relate to relatively ordinary persons, both men and women.
Fertility, childbirth and the protection of the child were of immense importance, yet we know little of childhood from formal sources; archaeology gives us better insights into households and home life, family size and structure, while schoolboys appear when they are copying traditional ‘wisdom’ texts (although girls are more elusive). Biological anthropology enables us to examine the actual bodies of Ancient Egyptians, as mummies or, more usually, as skeletons. It can tell us individual life stories and such things as average age at death in different time periods, height and build, and disease. The standard picture of the youthfully healthy tomb owner contrasts with both the inevitable background of illness and injury and the attitudes of society to the sick and disabled.
Threads such as these will shed light on these invisible Egyptians, and we will finish by examining the lives of foreigners in Egypt, people who are hard to spot as they tended to assimilate, often only their names revealing their nationality, yet who were a significant part of the population. Eventually the country came under the rule of foreign powers, with mixed effects on that assimilation.
