Biographical inscriptions are one of the most characteristic textual genres attested from ancient

Egypt, continuously documented from the mid-third millennium BC to Roman times. Inscribed in

hieroglyphs, the formal, display-oriented form of the Egyptian script, these texts present aspects

of individual lives and experience, sometimes as narratives of key events, sometimes as

characterisations of personal qualities. Interpretation, however, has proven difficult. The range of

Egyptian texts that we conventionally term ‘biographies’ or ‘autobiographies’ frustrate

expectations associated with Western definitions of the ‘genre’. Egyptian biographical texts also

underwent significant changes in format, materiality, contexts, configurations of language, and

functions over the three thousand years of their history. Despite such variety, biographies are

intuitively recognized as a specific type of Egyptian written discourse, differentiated from other

types (e.g. literary or funerary) by particular constraints of decorum and specific functions.

Examining these issues in further detail remains a major desideratum.

This exploratory workshop  will offer a context in

which to confront and debate current approaches to Egyptian biographies and self-presentation,

which have, until now, been developed mostly independently by specialists working on different

periods or in different frameworks.The whole will be structured

into thematic parts to encourage ‘conversations’ and debates between contributions.