The Centre hosts the following lecture:

Dr Elizabeth Frood (Oxford), ‘An unexpected script for an unexpected text: the tomb autobiography of the Egyptian Royal Secretary Tjay’

Abstract: Sometime between 1213 and 1204 BC, Tjay, a high official responsible for royal correspondence, commissioned an autobiographical text as part of the decoration of his monumental tomb cut into the desert escarpment on the west bank of Thebes (modern Luxor). This alone would have been a surprising choice: autobiography, which been a central monumental genre since the third millennium BC, was not popular for elite self-presentation at this time. Even more extraordinary was the decision to carve the text in hieratic, the cursive, ‘documentary’ form of the Egyptian script, rather than hieroglyphs, the monumental script par excellence. This seminar presents some of the work in progress of Fredrik Hagen (Copenhagen University) and myself to reconstruct and analyse what remains of this damaged text, drawing especially on epigraphic drawings held in the Griffith Institute archive in Oxford. I consider features of this script in the tomb context and in relation to the few other known monumental uses of hieratic, exploring themes relating to materiality of script, display of artistic and scribal creativity and virtuosity, and implications for Tjay’s self-display.