ABSTRACT
The residents of Tombos projected a strong image of Egyptian identity through their adherence to Egyptian funerary practice and monumental architecture, and yet several women chose to be buried in Nubian style. In a similar way, the archaeological evidence from Askut indicates considerably more flexibility and room for individual agency in Egyptian-Nubian interactions across the imperial frontier than the highly regulated system implied by royal edicts like the boundary stela of Senwosret III and ideological categorizations like the foreigner topos. How can we reconcile the contradiction between political statements and ideology in texts and representations that portray a uniform Egyptian ethnos and seemingly immutable political and ethnic boundaries with the variability of ethnic expression and boundedness at Askut and Tombos? Egyptologist Barry Kemp (1997) argues that we should look first to ideology to understand the motivations behind Egypt’s empire. In effect he argues that we must choose between ideology and archaeology, and that the foreigner topos should guide our interpretation of the archaeological evidence. He goes on to maintain that by acknowledging an interpretation based on archaeology that is at odds with the picture presented by ideology, we dismiss ideology as irrelevant, mere posturing. As Morris (1992: 200) points out, archaeology is not a “zero-sum game, with its value declining in the relationship to the amount of literary evidence available.” Both archaeological and historical evidence have their own unique problems of interpretation, but at the same time each presents important information that should not be ignored (Deetz 1983; Glassie 1975; Knapp 1993). The integration of archaeology and text provides an opportunity in this case not only better to
understand the nature and dynamics of the physical boundaries of ancient imperial states, but also to assess the role of ideology in constructing political and ethnic boundaries that served as a legitimating tool for early rulers.
