Who was poor in pharaonic Egypt and in its Near Eastern neighbourhood

»Who was poor in pharaonic Egypt and in its Near Eastern neighbourhood. Social Stratification and Visibility according to texts, pictures and archaeology«

Poverty in the ancient world is a complex subject that remained quite unexplored by disciplines such as Egyptology and Near Eastern studies. Many questions arise when it comes to studying poor people. The first is the definition of poverty itself. In such a case, it is absolutely essential to deconstruct the notion of our own definitions and attempt to retrace the definition of the ancients. To do so, we need to turn to the available sources and critically review them.

How are the poor described? How is poverty defined? How are such notions depicted in written and iconographic sources? What can we learn from archaeology? These initial questions lead to further questions and issues. How did society perceive the poor and how was it reflected? We might also wonder about the establishment of criteria for categorising, via material culture, people in social strata seen as ‘poor’. Poverty and consideration of who were the poor is therefore a broad area of research that can be approached in a variety of ways.

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars who would like to contribute to research on the history of poverty in ancient Egypt and the Near East, spanning the period from the middle of the 3rd to the end of the 1st millennium B.C.