Travelers

Presenters

Nikolaos Lazaridis, California State University, Sacramento

Abstract

Ancient travelers of the Darb Ain Amur, an evolving network of desert routes that have been connecting Kharga and Dakhla oases since the Neolithic era, spent several days in the midst of the unwelcoming environment in Egypt’s Western Desert. In the course of their desert crossing, ancient travelers often felt the need to leave behind them on nonmonumental sandstone massifs carved marks of their fleeting presence invoking divine powers that could potentially protect them in those desolate parts of the Egyptian desert. In this way, ancient travelers participated in a time-defying process of negotiating their individual identities and religious experiences with the shared practices and values of desert travelers’ community.

In this paper, I first briefly identify the various manners in which the divine was invoked in textual and pictorial graffiti from the pharaonic, Hellenistic, and Roman eras—this corpus of graffiti has been recorded and is being published by the North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey team. Then I trace, relying on the established sequence of carving events on specific rock surfaces, desert travelers’ responses to such divine-invoking graffiti. By “transcribing” these dialogues among such graffiti—as Alain Delattre (Scribbling through History: Graffiti, Places, and People from Antiquity to Modernity [London, 2018] 37–47) did, for example, in the case of Christian graffiti in Thebes, I attempt to reconstruct facets of desert travelers’ religious experience, which, among other things, involved ritualistic efforts to imitate, enhance, distort, or even destroy earlier travelers’ divine invocations.