Cycles of life and death: Narrative homology and archaeological realities

Egyptian data speak to modern interpreters in many ways; through the rich i conographic repertoire, the materiality of houses and tombs and through the vast corpus of writings left to us. At the New Kingdom village of Deir el Medina (c. 1500-1100 BC) each of these data sets is available and can be us ed dialectically to gain a more intimate knowledge of lifecycles and indivi dual life experience. Using excerpts from the documents and personal letter s of the community I present the villagers' own narratives of life experien ce: pregnancy, birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age and death. These potent vignettes of life potentially have material correlates in the archaeology of the village-the individual houses and tombs which have rema ined in a remarkable state of preservation. For instance, the Eastern Necro polis at Deir el Median is layered in terms of the lifecycle: neonates were buried at the base of the slope, followed by children and adolescents mid- slope and adults were buried at the high point of the hill. Using and expli citly narrative style, I aim to show the conjoinings and ruptures between v arious levels of evidence and, at the same time, allow for a more sensuous and embodied understanding of cycles of life in Egyptian culture.