Politics and Royal Foreign Women in the Court of Egypt: A New Analysis of Diplomatic Marriages during Late Bronze Age.

Project Information

PRINCESS

Grant agreement ID: 898329

DOI

10.3030/898329

Project closed

EC signature date 7 April 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 184 707,84

EU contribution

€ 184 707,84

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PRINCESS (Politics and Royal Foreign Women in the Court of Egypt: A New Analysis of Diplomatic Marriages during Late Bronze Age.)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The PRINCESS project adresses the issue of foreign women living at the Egyptian Court durung the 2nd Millenium BC.

Objective 1: Define the role and status of the foreign wives at the Egyptian Court
The general nature of the alliances and the matrimonial practices have been apprehended.
The analysis of the documentation allowed to show that foreign practices were adopted to seal the alliance.
Then, an updated list of the known foreign wives and their female retinue has been gathered in the PRINCESS database. I have been able to discover new princesses, never recorded as foreign royal wives. It must be noted that in the textual sources at our disposal, we have no letter directly sent from a foreign princess to her family ot to her future husband.The study has also shown thatthese wives are played a decisive role at the Egyptian Court.

Objective 2: Understand the phenomenon of acculturation
The acculturation phenomenon of the foreign court ladies has been approached through two main aspects.
1) study of their anthroponyms
- Through the textual data, we were able to find clear non-Egyptian names, some from the Levant area, some from Mittani, or more generally attributed to Ancient Near East. The case of the Hittite princess, for which we know only the Egyptian name (Maathornerure) and not her foreign name is so far the only sure case of an Egyptian name given to a foreign wife. A less known Queen, Sutaliya, mother of the future king Siptah (1194-1188 BC) was probably of Syrian origins, highlighting her status at the Egyptian court.
- In the correspondence between the kings, the bride is often designated as “my daughter” or “my sister”: in these cases, the study of the anthroponym was not possible, but the princesses were listed according to their country of origin.
2) study of the burials belonging to these foreign royal women discovered in Egypt. Two main tombs have been analyzed for this purpose: the tomb of the three foreign wives of Thutmose III and the plundered tomb discovered by Pr. Susanne Bickel in the Valley of the kings. Both showed that most of the funerary equipment they carried in the afterlife was from Egyptian origin and that they were buried in places devoted to the royal family. Hence the status of secondary wives of the Egyptian king as minor wives has been reassessed in the light of gender studies and gender archaeology.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work was carried out from 1 September 2020 to 31 August 2022. It was mainly based at the CNRS (France, CNRS, UMR 7041, ArScAn, team HAROC) under the supervision of Dr. Aline Tenu, Assyriologist and specialist of funerary practices (CNRS, team HAROC). The offices of this CNRS laboratory are located in Nanterre, at the MSH Mondes (“Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Mondes”) under the triple tutelage of the CNRS and the Universities of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris Nanterre. Due to this collaborative research center, I was able to participate in several training courses at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Akkadian, Cuneiform, Mesopotamian History, Gender Studies).

The subject of the PRINCESS project required to collect textual, iconographic and archaeological data already published.
Two stays of three months each were initially planned for the secondment at the University of Basel (Unibas, Switzerland) with Pr. Susanne Bickel, Egyptologist, as my mentor in order to work on material she excavated in Egypt in the Luxor area (King’s Valley, KV 40). I was able to work on the data discovered by Pr. Bickel, which includes notably women of the royal entourage of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BC) bearing foreign names. I also had access there to the library of the University.

During the fellowship, two fieldwork seasons in Egypt were planned on the site of Gurob (20 november-22 december 2020 and 21 november-22 december 2021), where I am leading excavations since 2017. The site houses the remains of a harem-palace of the Late Bronze Age Period as well as the necropolis of its inhabitants, including foreign population. Even with the COVID-19 situation, the first season was done but shortened. Consequently, during the first short season (03-17 december 2020) the team was able to make surveys of the area interesting for the PRINCESS project (ie. the location of ancient town and tombs in sectors Alpha and Beta) and the excavations were initiated during the second season (21 november-22 december 2021).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The PRINCESS project addressed the topic of diplomatic marriages between the Egyptian court and the Great Kingdoms of Ancient Near East during the Late Bronze Age. The role and status of the foreign royal women have been explored in detail through a multidisciplinary approach incorporating both Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern sources (textual, archaeological and iconographic), and using the gender studies and gender archaeology methodology. The main research questions behind this project are: who were these princesses? Where were they from? What was the geo-political context behind these alliances between ANE countries and Egypt? Do we have information regarding their new life in a foreign court? To do so, an innovative approach was set up, including the textual data, but also archaeological and iconographic material, and combining sources from both Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern sides, which are gathered in the PRINCESS database. In addition, the two fieldwork seasons in Gurob gave preliminary results for the location of the ancient town and one of the necropolises from the Late Bronze Age.

The co-organization with Dr. Aline Tenu (supervisor, CNRS) and Dr. Philippe Clancier (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne university) of the 2-days symposium on Women and Diplomacy in the Late Bronze Age. Egypt and Ancient Near East was one of the main achievements of the project. Gathering 15 specialists this sympOsium will be a key-reference for former studies. It was not only focused on the alliances between Egypt and Ancient Near East, but also between the different kingdoms of Ancient Near East, as a source of comparison. The strategies and stakes of these diplomatic alliances have been studied, as well as their legal aspects. The originality of this symposium laid in the fact that all the main Late Bronze Age kingdoms were part of the study: Egypt, Hatti, Mittani, Assyria, Babylonia and Amurru. The concept of agency was highly discussed as an analytical tool applied to these royal women. The proceedings of the symposium will be published in the “Women of the Past” series (Brepols Publishers), mainly in English in order to reach a broader audience. This workshop has also been the occasion for me to build a network among the international specialists of Ancient Near Eastern studies working on the history of women and gender studies

The PRINCESS project had a high impact on my career by expanding my scientific qualifications. With the different trainings I followed, I am now able to build a bridge between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Near East studies. The knowledge of Akkadian, which was the diplomatic language during the Late Bronze Age, has given me the opportunity to decipher the epistolary sources, which was a huge asset to determine the terminology used to designate the royal foreign women. The courses followed on Mesopotamian history also gave me a better understanding of the geo-political context of the Ancient Near-Eastern kingdoms and their evolution.

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