PLUNDER · Agency of spoils of war in Ancient Egypt

PLUNDER is an interdisciplinary study of agency (ability to affect) of ancient Egyptian spoils of war (humans,animals, things) in the nexus of social relations and hierarchies (soldiers, kings, deities) during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1070 BCE),when imperialism climaxed and Egypt established control over the Levant and Nubia. I will ambitiously go beyond the economicaspects of booty and stress its various social roles in ancient Egypt by analyzing 10 autobiographies of elite soldiers and “historical” records of kings, 30 lists of booty and 12 temples and tombs with visual representations of plunder. My researchobjectives are to reconstruct the logistics of state-monitored plundering, understand the structure of the lists of spoils of war andinvestigate the agency of booty in different contexts. To achieve this, I will combine well establishedmethods (philology, art history, archaeologies of Egypt, Levant and Nubia) and a novel agency-based approach to visual and textualrepresentations developed in anthropology. By analyzing the relations between primary agents (prototypes, patrons, artists andrecipients) and secondary agents (representations themselves) I will reconstruct the agent-patient social relations behind therepresentations of spoils of war. The initial start-up and the return phases will be based at Ludwig-Maximilian’s University of Munich(LMU) where I will be trained by Prof. Julia Budka, archaeologist and art historian, a leading expert on New Kingdom in Nubia. In theoutgoing phase at Barnard College (BC), Columbia University (CU), I will be trained by Prof. Ellen Morris, a leading expert on ancientEgyptian imperialism and warfare, as well as Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Levant. My results will impact both Egyptology andmilitary history by stressing different uses of spoils of war. The MSCA will position me as a future research group leader in interdisciplinary ancient warfare studies.