The Source:
SCENE 9: PUBLIC CEREMONIAL PERFORMANCE IN ANCIENT EGYPT: EXCLUSION AND INTEGRATION, by John Baines, in Archaeology of Performance: Theatres of Power, Community, and Politics, edited by Takeshi Inomata and Lawrence S. Coben, Rowman & Litdefield Publishers 2006
[Introduction]
While historians and social scientists accept the centrality of ritual and performance, including performance as public display, in constituting, representing, and sustaining authority in and between societies, archaeologists can have difficulty in identifying correlates for this social centrality in the material record. Ritual actions in small-scale societies may leave little trace if their enactment requires no more than the existence of a suitable space, without constructed features. Nonetheless, in studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, for example, the identification and interpretation of ritual spaces is a significant focus of research, even where the material evidence is sparse and takes such forms as enclosures and cursus monuments. Results like these should encourage the search for comparable elements in regions where little that is relevant has been identified.
For complex societies and civilizations, spaces for ritual performance and ritually organized features of the built environment are often readily identifiable and major features of the record. Their importance is widely appreciated, even though their large scale and patterns of their use and reuse may make it difficult to investigate them archaeologically. …
… Because ruling groups in early civilizations were small and initiation and other restrictions surrounded many of their core activities, one must ask how much those states were concerned with public spectacle, performance, and competitions, of a kind that would be comparable, for example, with what is typical of Greek and Roman civilization.
Were central elite concerns enacted in such a way as to address only small numbers of people—as against such groups as deities and the dead—or did performances held in larger arenas of the built or managed environment address wider sections of the community? If such performances occurred, what character did they have? …
Dream City, by Paul Klee (Date: 1921)
Discussion and Conclusion
Exclusion
Egyptian material poses acutely the question of who is addressed by display and performance. I have argued that, while some displays encompassed the entire managed environment and distinctively exploited the arena of the Nile as the country's essential means of travel and transport, and hence of social encounters, much symbolic incorporation of spectacle was exclusionary.
In a sense, exclusion of humanity in general was inclusion of those who mattered more: sacred spaces that were dedicated to the gods while signifying celebration in the world outside enabled society's most important members, who were not human but divine, to benefit more fully from human performance. The actors may have seen this exclusion as self-evident, especially since requirements of purity and limited access to temples were ancient and seemingly universal. As indicated, the dearth of pictorial material relating to spectators in festivals may have more to do with who were the recipients of the display than with audience. Other contexts such as processional ways, together with associated evidence, suggest that complementary patterns of gatherings of people occurred and effected communication from social superiors to inferiors. …
… The core tales and instructions of Egypt's classical literature may have been performed before audiences—a far more likely mode of dissemination than distribution on papyrus for private reading—but they are complex, high-cultural products, some of which make play with "simple" narrative. These works are part of central elite culture, not anything that would have been a vehicle for broad spectacle, and their audiences were presumably elites.
Here one might compare the Indian dramas of Kalidasa, whose topics and treatments might seem at first sight to have a broad appeal—and have had some success in the West in the past two centuries—but which are composed in a mixture of two languages, of which Sanskrit was no longer a vernacular at the time they were written in the early centuries C.E. They can only have had full effect as performances addressed to an inner elite.
As with so many other questions relating to the material, pictorial, and textual legacy of early civilizations, spectacle and performance cannot be seen simply as socially integrative displays that legitimized Egyptian inequality or, for example, as offering diversion or distraction on the lines of the "bread and circuses" evoked by the Roman ruling elite.
People were mobilized for great projects, which constituted goals that involved much of society. The processes of construction and inauguration of those projects created performances and spectacles that necessarily involved vast numbers of people, or smaller numbers over long periods.
In as monument-focused a civilization as Egypt, these processes were almost constant in several historical periods. Despite assertions that communities were included, the motivations which those who led projects were able to impart to participants and to audiences remain elusive. While "theatrical" performance may have been one medium for such imparting, the most potent and distinctive Egyptian legacy of spectacle is where it was appropriated and dedicated for the gods and the elite in temples and mortuary monuments.
Integration
Thus, whereas it is possible to analyze the exclusion of potential participants and spectators in relation to Egyptian spectacle, the integration of different social groups of actors is less easily addressed—not because such integration was lacking but because sources are sparse and the examples I have used have a different focus. …
… Among societies studied in this volume, Egypt was large in scale, long-lasting, and centralized. The cosmological anchoring of institutions like major festivals is common to most complex societies, but the deities may have been more central in ancient models of Egyptian society than in some others.
It is meaningful to see integration of spectacle within the spaces of deities as more symbolically important than broad involvement of people, while legitimizing aspects may have been less significant in a relatively stable Egypt than in fragmented and competitive Maya city-states or the short-lived Inka empire.
Little Egyptian material evokes the creation of an integrated state, as against its maintenance, reaffirming an established order rather than affirming a new one. …
… it is possible to paint a richer and more diverse picture of human interaction in societies where ethnohistoric evidence is available than for ones without post-archaeological successors.
Lessons from ethnohistoric cases cannot be simply imposed on diverse societies and periods, but the insights they offer bring out to the archaeologist and ancient historian both the social centrality of spectacle and the difficulty of approaching its meaning. In this context, the most distinctive element in the Egyptian material is celebration of the creation of monuments and spaces, as reflexively depicted in scenes of the completion of pyramids and transport of colossal statues discussed above.
This is where mass participation was most necessary and probably most involving across different social groups … Monument as spectacle is a visibly fundamental idea that resonates in Egypt as in many places. The appropriation of the monument's meaning to the very center, both for its creation and for the spectacles held within it and depicted in places where deities more than people had access, is perhaps characteristic of large-scale, territorial societies. [END]
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Castle and Sun, by Paul Klee (Date: 1928)