Ancient Egyptian Conviviality: A Gap in Modern Knowledge?

Despite the presence of vast numbers of scenes of food, drink, and preparations for eating and drinking on ancient Egyptian monuments, images of people partaking in what is shown, whether separately or together, are rather few. Yet some sort of conviviality is more or less essential to human life, and still more for celebrations. One problem is that such a high proportion of what is known about Egyptian society derives from tombs and the world of the dead. This lecture uses pictorial and textual sources, as well as elements of material culture, to suggest likely features of conviviality and elite settings, including structures in which banquets might have taken place as well as conventions that limit the range of what was shown. A small group of monuments offers important insight into banquets after funerals, and probably also into repeated festivals of communication with the dead. More broadly, the ubiquity of death was seen, then perhaps even more than now, as a reason to eat and drink—perhaps drink more than eat—before it is too late, an idea that the ancient Greeks perhaps surprisingly saw as exotic. Conceptions such as these surely related to customs among the living more than among the dead. The highly extravagant description of a banquet and its setting under Ptolemy II Philadelphus may be suggestive for levels of expenditure that could also have surrounded banquets in earlier periods.

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John Baines is Emeritus Professor of Egyptology in the University of Oxford. He has held visiting appointments in universities and research institutions in a number of countries. For Spring Semester 2014 he is Old Dominion Fellow in Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His chief research interests are in Egyptian art, religion, literature, and the comparative modeling of social forms and institutions, including writings systems. His most recent books are Visual and written culture in ancient Egypt (2007) and High culture and experience in ancient Egypt (2013). He has translated two German books on Egyptology into English.

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