Dr. Uroš Matić: Dress, Adornment and Coloniality of Gender and Desire in New Kingdom Egypt and Nubia

About the lecture

After a series of conflicts, starting with ca. 1550 BCE, Egypt slowly but surely defeated the kingdom of Kush with its capital in Kerma and conquered Nubia. Very early on, the Egyptian state sponsored the foundation of a number of settlements known as “temple-towns”. These were populated by first generation settler Egyptians, but also local Nubians and later on deportees from the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. Over the following centuries the demographics of the region changed considerably, now also including second and later generation Egyptians, people of local Nubian descent, people of mixed descent etc. The region was administrated based on the Egyptian state model and from early on local elites were part of this administration often described as “colonial”.

Whereas early to mid-20th century scholars largely projected their own colonial experiences onto New Kingdom in Egypt and Nubia, recent debates inspired by postcolonial and decolonial theory took a critical stance towards this. The focus is now on local agency, complex entanglements of identities and material culture, ambiguity, and mimicry, as a local response to colonization.
Dress and adornment play an important role in this discussion. However, their gender aspects have so far not been highlighted. There is a difference in the way Egyptians, Nubians, and Nubians in Egyptian service or administration dressed and adorned. Furthermore, Nubian women are attested as dependents in Egyptian households in Egypt and there is also evidence that Nubian men were desirable palace personnel (e.g., fan-bearers) in Egypt and the Near East.

Therefore, this paper considers the possibility that Egyptian colonization of Nubia also had consequences on how gender was understood in different contexts. Starting from the fact that dress and adornment are often means to fulfil certain norms of gender, this paper examines how these could have been contested in a colonial setting. Last but not the least, this paper will deal with the question if it is possible to postulate a notion of “colonial desire” in the Late Bronze Age.

This lecture is a part of the Digital Lecture Series, Ancient Adornment on strategies of body adornment in ancient Mediterranean cultures. https://www.tf.uio.no/english/researc...