Tara Prakash

Previous scholars have hypothesized that a group of nine wooden statuettes of bound foreign captives from the funerary temple of Raneferef had originally been part of an article of furniture, most likely a royal throne.  This paper reassesses these arguments.  Visual analysis suggests that four different artists, who were working within two distinct groups or “workshops,” carved the statuettes.  As a result, it seems most likely that the statuettes were actually part of two different objects.  Moreover, comparison with preserved chairs and thrones, as well as ancient images of them, demonstrates that the Raneferef captives do not readily fit this context.  Rather, most likely the statuettes had been part of two statue naoi or shrines.

During the late Old Kingdom, six different pharaohs erected nearly life-size, limestone statues of kneeling, bound captives inside their pyramid complexes.  These statues, which are commonly known as prisoner statues, were clearly an important part of the monument’s decoration.  Yet, scholars still struggle to understand many issues concerning the statues, including exactly how they were used and who they depict.  This talk focused on the prisoner statues from one particular pyramid complex, that of Pepi I.  It was presented at the American Research Center in Egypt – Pennsylvania Chapter, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 14, 2018

During the Nineteenth Dynasty, King Ramses II tried to reestablish Egyptian control over the Syrian city of Kadesh, which the Hittites of Anatolia had conquered in the late Eighteenth Dynasty.  He recorded the epic battle that he fought at Kadesh against the Hittite Empire and its allies in a series of reliefs, which he had carved onto temple walls throughout Egypt.  These reliefs preserve multiple textual and pictorial accounts of Ramses’ struggle.  In this lecture, I consider how the Egyptians portrayed the Hittite king and his coalition in the Kadesh texts and images in order to shed light on both the Egyptian conception of foreigners and the purpose of these reliefs inside the Egyptian temple.  It was presented at “Egypt and her Neighbours: The Eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd Millennium BC,” Mini-Symposium of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities – Toronto Chapter, Toronto, Canada, March 4, 2018.

This paper considers the ancient Egyptians’ understanding of pain and examines the significance that pain might have had in Egyptian society and culture using select examples from Old and Middle Kingdom reliefs and texts.  It was presented at the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting in Tucson, Arizona, April 20-22, 2018.

This paper investigates the relationship between the prisoner statues and the contemporary two-dimensional representations of foreigners in order to investigate two important issues.  First, how did the location of the prisoner statues compare to the location of reliefs featuring foreigners in the pyramid complex?  Was the two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery set in the same rooms, thus complementing and reinforcing each other, or were they placed in different areas, with the one type replacing or substituting for the other?  Second, I consider how the depiction of foreigners during the late Old Kingdom differed in statuary and relief.  It was presented at the 7th Old Kingdom Art and Archaeology Conference in Milan, Italy, July 3-7, 2017

This paper presents the heads of the Pepi I prisoner statues and compares them to contemporary elite and royal statuary in order to evaluate their relationship to other Old Kingdom statues and assess the degree to which they are realistic, individualized, and examples of ancient Egyptian portraiture.  In this way, it also addresses the question of the statues’ ethnicities and the issues associated with trying to assign each head to a specific ethnic category.  It was presented at the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, April 21-23, 2016.

This paper briefly outlines the development of the prisoner statues.  It presents select examples from each of the six pyramid complexes that originally contained them and proposes a stylistic evolution of the statue type.  At the same time, it also considers changes that occurred from complex to complex in the statues’ original placement, treatment, and function.  Tentative suggestions as to why the prisoner statues first appeared and why they were discontinued at the end of the Old Kingdom are also offered.  It was presented at the Egyptology Graduate Conference at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, October 15, 2016.

Previous scholars have generally described the bodies of the prisoner statues as repetitive and crude, dismissing them in favor of the individualized heads.  Moreover, a complete prisoner statue has never been found, leading scholars to suggest that the statues may have been ritually damaged.  This paper reassess these ideas specifically for the Pepi I prisoner statues.  It was presented at the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, April 15-17, 2016.

This paper reexamines the archaeological evidence for the original location of the prisoner statues from the pyramid complex of Pepi II.  It also considers the two-dimensional decorative program of this complex and the way in which it may or may not relate to the placement of the prisoner statues.  I presented this at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Annual Scholars Colloquium in Toronto, Canada, November 6-8, 2015.

This paper presents comparative archaeological artifacts and parallel objects depicted in two-dimensional art in order to evaluate and help reconstruct the original function of nine wooden statuettes of bound captives that were discovered in the pyramid complex of Raneferef.  It was presented at the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, April 4-6, 2014.