Sidestone Press Perspectives on Lived Religion: Practices Transmission Landscape: 21 (Papers on Archaeology of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities)

Religion in the ancient world, and ancient Egyptian religion in particular, is often perceived as static, hierarchically organised, and centred on priests, tombs, and temples. Engagement with archaeological and textual evidence dispels these beguiling if superficial narratives, however. Individuals and groups continuously shaped their environments, and were shaped by them in turn. This volume explores the ways in which this adaptation, negotiation, and reconstruction of religious understandings took place. The material results of these processes are termed 'cultural geography'. The volume examines this 'cultural geography' through the study of three vectors of religious agency: religious practices, the transmission of texts and images, and the study of religious landscapes. Bringing together papers by experts in a variety of Egyptological disciplines and other fields of study, this volume presents the results of an interdisciplinary workshop held at the University of Leiden, 7-9 November 2018, kindly funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Vidi Talent Scheme. The 16 papers presented here discuss the archaeology of religion and religious practices, landscape archaeology and 'cultural geography', and the transmission and adaptation of texts and images, across not only the history of Egypt from the Early Dynastic to the Christian periods, but also in ancient Sudanese archaeology, the Arabian peninsula, early and medieval south-eastern Asia, and contemporary China. From the Publisher Nico Staring is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Vidi project The Walking Dead at Saqqara: The Making of a Cultural Geography, kindly funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2017-2021). Staring studied Archaeology and Egyptology at Leiden University and received his doctorate at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia in 2016. Huw Twiston Davies is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Vidi-project The Walking Dead at Saqqara. The Making of a Cultural Geography, kindly funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2018-2022). Twiston Davies studied Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, where he received his doctorate in 2018. Dr. Lara Weiss is curator of the Egyptian collection of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, The Netherlands. She studied Egyptology in Berlin and Leiden and received her doctoral degree in Göttingen in 2012. She is especially interested in the daily life of the ancient Egyptians and their mode of religious experience. Both her master’s dissertation and her doctoral thesis related to religion in Deir el-Medina, where the labourers lived who worked in the Valley of the Kings. Since 2012 she has been involved as a teacher and a researcher in the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “cults” and “polis religion”, hosted by the University of Erfurt (Germany). Her research for that project is focused on religion in Roman Karanis (in the Fayoum Oasis). Weiss will play a central role in the reorganization of the Egyptian department at the National Museum of Antiquities in 2016 and will be involved in developing international travelling exhibitions. She will also support her fellow curator, Prof. Maarten Raven, in his work on the excavation run by the museum in the Egyptian town of Saqqara. From the Back Cover Religion in the ancient world, and ancient Egyptian religion in particular, is often perceived as static, hierarchically organised, and centred on priests, tombs, and temples. Engagement with archaeological and textual evidence dispels these beguiling if superficial narratives, however. Individuals and groups continuously shaped their environments, and were shaped by them in turn. This volume explores the ways in which this adaptation, negotiation, and reconstruction of religious understandings took place. The material results of these processes are termed 'cultural geography'. The volume examines