Ancient Egyptian Kings from Below: Royal Power in Practice

Egyptian kingship has traditionally been approached through royal evidence: bombastic rhetoric, monumental architecture, images of conquest and triumph. In recent years, scholarship has slowly moved away from narratives focused solely on royal monuments and texts to interrogate how kings and kingship fit into broader ancient Egyptian society. Luiza Osorio G. Silva’s current book project, Kings from Below, seeks to better understand where, when, why, and how non-
royal Egyptians in specifically the Middle Kingdom engaged with kingship. What changes about the modern understanding of ancient kingship when these kinds of concerns are taken into consideration alongside official ideology? The ways in which non-royal people engaged with the royal institution were variable and varied. Rather than an ancient Egypt in which culture was defined primarily in terms of kingship, non-royal evidence highlights that the relevance of royal power was highly dependent on social context and the circumstances of different actors.

Dr. Luisa Osorio G. Silva Assistant Professor of Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies, Department of Art History
University of California, Irvine
Colaboradora Doutorada / Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher
CHAM – Centro de Humanidades / Center for the Humanities
Universidade Nova de Lisboa / Nova

Time and Location
2pm, Concordia University, Grimm Hall South, DeNault Auditorium