NINO (Netherlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten) invites you the NINO Postdoctoral Research Fellow 5th Annual Conference, Unseen-Untold: Stories of Ancient Non-elite Communities. The event will take place in person at Leiden University from December 18–20, 2024, but it will also be livestreamed.

Following the general call in social sciences to focus on those forgotten by history based on elite’s records, the conference aims to offer new perspectives on the material and textual culture of those unseen and unmentioned in the ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern monumental landscape.

The conference will articulate several research paths:

• Defining concepts. As it has already been underlined, we lack precise definitions for people we call “intermediate elite,” “lower elite,” or “sub-elite,” and we need an accurate adaptation of these concepts inherited from the social sciences. It should be noted, however, that the definition of non-elite socio-professional classes might vary depending on the chrono-cultural contexts in which they were set. Therefore, the following questions will be asked anew for each different context: who were these people who managed to gather enough human and economic resources to appear within the monumental landscape built by the elite? How did they define themselves, individually and collectively? Which (new) socio-professional categories emerged at a specific period/place? What did they appear in our documentation?
• Close-up on the added value of art historical-materialist approaches. Such perspectives will question the means used to access funerary commemoration: what was legitimate or accepted to borrow from elite culture? Which networks were used to commission their own funerary monuments? What was valued as prestigious and precious? Which tricks were used to make a less valuable material “look like” an elite object?
• A cross-cultural perspective. These comparanda may help us to identify the specificities of ancient Egyptian/Nubian/Near Eastern societies and highlight culturally specific mechanisms at stake in these contexts.

To view the complete program and to register for the livestream, please see the conference’s website here.