Decoding Signs of Identity: Egyptian Workmen’s Marks in Archaeological, Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Perspective. Proceedings of a Conference in Leiden, 13-15 December 2013

Decoding Signs of Identity is the volume of proceedings resulting

from the symposium with the same name and held in Leiden, 13-15 December

2013, in the framework of the NWO research project “Symbolizing

Identity: Identity marks and their relation to writing in New Kingdom

Egypt’. The aim of the project, and indeed of the symposium, was to

investigate identity marks of Ancient Egyptian workmen, both in a

specialist, in-depth manner, and in a more general, comparative

perspective. The reader will recognise both of these approaches in the

present collection of papers. In the course of its three sections, the

topic is narrowed down from general considerations and non-Egyptian

cases, to various sorts of Ancient Egyptian identity marks, and finally

to the specific marking system of the royal necropolis workforce of the

Egyptian New Kingdom, which was the core material of the NWO project.

This volume can be considered a follow-up to Pictograms or Pseudo

Script? (EU XXV, 2009), and testifies to the continuing scholarly

interest in systems of identity marks, both in Egyptology and outside.