CALL FOR PAPERS Who was poor in pharaonic Egypt and in its Near Eastern neighbourhood. Social Stratification and Visibility according to texts, pictures and archaeology
International Conference, 4-6 September 2024
Location: Vienna (Austria)
Submission Deadline for abstracts: 26 February 2024
Poverty in the ancient world is a complex subject that remained quite unexplored by disciplines such as Egyptology and Near Eastern studies. Many questions arise when it comes to studying poor people. The first is the definition of poverty itself. In such a case, it is absolutely essential to deconstruct the notion of our own definitions and our attempt to retrace the definition of the ancients. To do so, we need to turn to the available sources and cri cally review them. How are the poor described? How is poverty defined? How are such no ons depicted in wri en and iconographic sources? What can we learn from archaeology? These initial questions lead to further questions and issues. How did society perceive the poor and how was it reflected? We might also wonder about the establishment of criteria for categorising, via material culture, people in social strata seen as ‘poor’. Poverty and considera on of who were the poor is therefore a broad area of research that can be approached in a variety of ways.
The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars who would like to contribute to research on the history of poverty in ancient Egypt and the Near East, spanning the period from the middle of the 3rd to the end of the 1st millennium B.C.
Among the topics to be discussed during this conference, we would like to draw attention to the following:
- definition of poverty and its problems;
- the methods for studying poverty in ancient socie es, and more broadly methodologies to assess social groups in an quity;
- visibility of the poor in texts and images;
- vocabulary and descrip on of poverty;
- perception and reflec on of the poor by the rest of the society;
- visibility of the poor in archaeology;
- establishing criteria for defining the poor and the categorisation of these social groups.
- habits and practices of the poor including their professions – what work did poor people do?