Hana Navrátilová: Visitors’ graffiti - traces of a re-appropriation of sacred spaces?

A talk at the conference Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces, held in Prague in June 2014. egyptologie.ff.cuni.cz/pdf/Lan...
Hana Navrátilová
Visitors’ graffiti - traces of a re-appropriation of sacred spaces?
The visitors’ graffiti corpus from Memphis and neighbouring areas includes texts from the archaeological sites of Abusir, Saqqara, Dahshur; and the site of Maidum near Fayyum oasis. The corpus consists of almost 400 texts of varied length.
The texts are placed within recognised sacred spaces of royal funerary complexes and sun temples. They are also part of a wider landscape of the necropolis. Using mainly Saqqara and Dahshur material, the paper aims at suggesting a contextualisation of the graffiti within a broader sacred landscape of Memphis. Graffiti production might have been motivated by different aspects of religious experience as well as cultural memory.