Town and District: Local Administration during the Second Intermediate Period
Kathryn Bandy
PhD candidate in Egyptology, University of Chicago
When:
Saturday, June 6, 2015
5:00 PM
Where:
LaSalle Banks Room
Oriental Institute
1155 E 58th St
Chicago, IL 60637
The creation of a highly complex and nuanced bureaucracy remains one of the most frequently studied and discussed aspects of ancient Egyptian society. Egypt’s elite officials are well known from its monumental record and the titles held by these men have allowed for a broad understanding of the country’s administrative framework. These monuments, however, provide little information about the daily operations of urban centers and their general workforces.
Excavations at Tell Edfu since 2005 have recovered a large corpus of hieratic ostraca dating to the late Second Intermediate Period and early New Kingdom. The vast majority of these texts are seemingly simple administrative records that provide only limited information. There are very few titled individuals. In many cases, only personal names and numbers are present. Nevertheless, these ostraca provide important information about Edfu’s internal administration, its workforce, and population as a whole. This talk will explore the network of the local institutions in ancient Edfu and the men and women they employed.
Kathryn E. Bandy is a PhD candidate in Egyptology at the University of Chicago. Her research examines urban institutions, their connections to one another, and their workforces using contemporary documentary and monumental sources. She has worked with the Oriental Institute’s Tell Edfu Project since 2009 and is currently editing the corpus of hieratic ostraca from the site.
These lectures are sponsored by the Illinois chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt.
