The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Cross-Cultural Comparison in Egyptology

Recorded: April 10, 2025
Event: Whither Global Antiquity? Retrospection and Future Directions
Citation: Morris, Ellen. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Cross-Cultural Comparison in Egyptology,” Global Antiquity: Whither Global Antiquity (April 10, 2025).

by Ellen Morris (Barnard College)

As a discipline, Egyptology has been frequently critiqued for its insularity. In this wide-ranging talk, I address these critiques and the manner in which insularity and its perceived correlate—irrelevance—have contributed to the dire state of this field in American universities. At the same time, however, Egyptologists have always utilized the present to think with the past, for good and ill, just as politicians in Egypt routinely plumb the past in order to inflect the present. In recent decades, following Bruce Trigger’s lead, Egyptologists have increasingly engaged in targeted cross-cultural comparisons. Such efforts, while not above critique, are helping to combat notions of Egyptian exceptionalism both within the field and beyond it. As a scholar who resorts to both frontal and lateral comparisons with relative frequency, I argue that they prove particularly valuable in imparting fresh perspectives when a lack of new evidence has resulted in a scholarly impasse. 

About the Speaker

Ellen Morris is Professor of Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and the author of three books: The Architecture of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Evolution of Foreign Policy in Egypt’s New Kingdom, Ancient Egyptian Imperialism, and Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt. She also writes on topics of cross-cultural interest such as divine kingship and retainer sacrifice, sacred sexuality and birth magic, island theory, climate change, the dynamics of political fragmentation, and the gendered politics of war. She has excavated at Amheida in Dakhleh Oasis and at Abydos, Deir el-Ballas, and Mendes. Morris earned her PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently co-developing Mapping the Wandering Goddess, a digital relational database devoted to the study of Egyptian religion.