The Collapse of Faience Figurine Production at the End of the Middle Kingdom: Reading the History of an Epoch between Postmodernism and Grand Narrative

Abstract

The aim of the article is to trace the history of faience figurines in late Middle Kingdom Egypt, following a metanarrative level of synthesis. Moving from one of the most visible changes in the course of history, the turn from Modernism to Postmodernism, the article defines a key to read the path of faience figurine production from their appearance in the late Middle Kingdom to their disuse at the end of the Second Intermediate Period: changes in the pattern of society correspond to the production of a different material culture and to the abandonment of previous perceptions. Faience figurines represent a diagnostic category of objects defining a specific epoch. Their value as historical signatures is here used to supply a different interpretation for the history of the Second Intermediate Period Egypt, integrating microhistories with bigger pictures, as a combination of Postmodernism and Grand Narratives approaches.

The Craft of the Non-mechanically Reproducible: Targeting Centres of Faience Figurine Production in 1800–1650 BC Egypt

“…According to Liverani's parameters field 3 ("Technical skill required") and field 4 ("Destination of the finished products"), faience figurine production seems to indicate a high degree of centralisation, as the resulting variables would be more likely to be regulated by a craftsmanship supported by the elite. 102 The assumption of centralised production, however, produces conflicts with respect to Liverani's two other parameters (1 and 2). Parameter 1 ("Value and provenance of the raw materials") indicates that the raw materials were easily accessible and widely dispersed across the country.…”

“…103 As shown in the case-study of Serabit el-Khadim, the raw materials could have been obtained and produced locally so that faience production did not depend on specific locations for raw materials, or on particular places where special tools or makers were located. 104 Faience production could not, therefore, be easily controlled through all the steps of the chaîne opératoire, and as something that could not be fully controlled, it could also escape the control of the elite. This is precisely what makes faience an ambiguous media that straddles the fence between being categorised as a prestigious material or a commonly available material.…”

Burial Demography in the Late Middle Kingdom: a Social Perspective

“…In turn, increased numbers of link inside corporate social groups may be mirrored in the altered burial demography at the end of the Middle Kingdom (see the increase of bodies in sequential multiple burials, but also the lexical changes in the vocabulary relating to the family, 124 and the extended social inclusion for the term Ab.t in the Coffin Text spell 146). A renewed social structure needs to renegotiate its material bridges with the symbols of its identity: this is not only visible in the change and transformation of the objects in the funerary equipment 125 but also in the number of people involved in one of the symbolic places of collective memory, the tomb, which brings a living community in close contact with the dead. Strategies of social memory may change across the time.…”