As a part of the IFAO-Sorbonne Research Program "ÉCRITURES", an international conference will be held from 15 to 17 June 2019. Organized by Khaled Hassan (Cairo University/IFAO) & Chloé Ragazzoli (Sorbonne Université), the sessions of the conference will all take place in Cairo, at the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO). The practice of graffiti, rock inscriptions and secondary epigraphy in Ancient Egypt need to be examined, elucidated and evaluated in relation to their archaeological and environmental contexts. This conference seeks to render ever more discernible these voices from the past, long regarded as inconsequential and perfunctory, by shedding new light on their interrelational links with visual reception, society and culture. The papers aim to map corpora of graffiti throughout the Egyptian space and to address common issues of definitions and interpretations. It will assess various lines of enquiry such as the relations and dialogues that graffiti create with not only their natural environments (landscape) but also with man-made spaces; the social context of graffiti creation and their reception by an audience when considered as artefacts of cultural practices and performances ; the relations and dialogues between various epigraphic layers on a single surface and with their surroundings ; the semiotic value of various graphical. The conference will also be an opportunity for discussion on the technical tools and concepts which are available for both documentation and publication and exploitation. The edited volume of the conference aims to offer a map of graffiti practices, types of graffiti, relevant sites, communities and spaces covered by graffiti.

During the 2018-2019 seasons, part of the New Kingdom Research Foundation’s mission in the Western Wadis near Luxor was to identify and locate – or at times re-locate – graffiti marked in the wadis. During the survey we identified graffiti from possible Predynastic through to the Late Antique (and even to the modern day) at a variety of locations. Interpreting the purpose of this graffiti requires more than just the analysis of the markings themselves – it extends to combining an understanding of the changing landscape and geology with a phenomenological approach to space. In this paper, we will focus on a panel of graffiti located in what is known as Wadi 300. By unpeeling the layers of this panel, we can find a small summary of Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the Coptic. It appears to suggest that the changing environment of the Western Wadis changed the use of the wadis in general, which in turn impacted the type of graffiti left behind during different periods.

Recent work by the Polish mission in Asasif brought to light 11 fragments of an inscription in the name of the vizier Paser, coming from the chapel, the cult space of Khety’s tomb (TT 311). The fragments are one with two fragments found earlier and exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Together they form an inscription that is now almost complete, shedding light on Paser’s self-fashioning as a scholar and a kind of Khaemwaset of the South. This hieroglyphic graffito can be considered as a restoration label in the name of Paser on a monument of an illustrious predecessor. By raising himself to the level of his illustrious ancestors whose monuments marked the sacred landscape of his time, Paser demonstrated his scholarship and social pre-eminence.

https://www.sidestone.com/books/perspectives-on-lived-religion-ii

International Conference "Making and Experiencing Graffiti in Ancient and Late Antique Egypt and Sudan", Leiden University, 15-17 December 2021. The private tomb-chapels of the Theban necropolis provide a large corpus of visual representations that were presumably accessible to a wide range of people as soon as they were produced, at least on several occasions; contrary to temple decorations to which only certain individuals had limited access. Like other kind of reactions to images, textual and figural graffiti bear witness to the agency of such iconographic environments as seen from an art historical viewpoint. They also give fairly explicit clues about how ancient visitors engaged productively with the decorations, driven by various needs and expectations regarding their content. Through the analyse of different groups of graffiti in connection with their iconographic support, it seems possible to show how socio-professional identity, knowledge, experience and motivations, had on strong impact on the way some visitors to these chapels gave meaning to the images they came across and made concrete use of their capacities, while others remained silent. These processes of definition and actualisation of the image’s varying potentialities can go so far as to broaden traditional Egyptological perspectives on the very meaning of visual representations.

Fieldwork in early 2019 by the Gebelein Archaeological Project encompassed surveys of two cemeteries situated south of the ancient town of Per-Hathor/Pathyris in the area of the Eastern Mountain of Gebelein. One of these is dated to the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period, the other tentatively to Fatimid times. The third survey searched for local chert sources on the Western Mountain, investigating a local tradition of lithic tool production.

Rock reliefs and inscriptions carved on the living rock in Near Eastern archaeological landscapes have often been called “monuments”. A place-based analysis of such sites of rock carving and inscription from the Anatolian countryside during the Late Bronze and Early-Middle Iron Ages (roughly 14th through 7th centuries BCE) suggest that many of the rock-cut inscriptions in Hieroglyphic Luwian and associated pictorial imagery oscillate between being a monument and a graffito, if one carefully consider the landscape context, carving technology, and the visual and verbal content of the reliefs and inscriptions. In this paper, I focus on a cluster of rock inscriptions and reliefs in western Anatolia at the sites of Karabel, Akpınar, and Suratkaya, whose inscriptions collectively link to a genealogy of kings in the Land of Mira. I argue that alternative ontologies of graffiti and its territorial character as a distribution of the body may shed light on our current interpretations of rock inscriptions and reliefs in Hittite and Iron Age Anatolia. I conclude by suggesting that the graffiti are no less political than monuments themselves; they also speak to territoriality, the desire to shape and control public space, and allow an effective referencing of the past.