Since the Champollion 1820s publications, Egyptology has remained predominantly a study of ancient writings in the Egyptian language. In the history of ancient Greek and Roman archaeology, written evidence also tended to receive most attention (Morris 1994). As there, philological focus on particular writings separated Egyptology from archaeological fieldwork practice and theory (Giddy 1999). With relatively few exceptions, Egyptologists worked on monumental temples and tombs and failed to apply the advances in prehistoric archaeology to settlement sites, resulting in chronic gaps and distortions throughout our knowledge of the ancient society (Moreno Garcia 2009).
When Eurocentric philological Egyptology adopted as its object of study the language area of ancient Egyptian, they might have defined ancient Egypt as one speech community, tangible in space and time through ancient manuscript and inscription. For emergent nations of nineteenth-century and above all early twentieth-century history, language area may have provided an implicit natural definition as the earliest nation-state. However, in Egyptological practice, script took precedence over language. Although Egyptian is still today written in a Greek-based alphabet, Coptic, and although Coptic is taught in many Egyptology departments, Egyptologists keep the ancient hieroglyphic script as the hallmark of their area of study. Their choice builds on intermittent precedents in Greek, Latin,
Renaissance, and later European writings, where hieroglyphs epitomized enigmatic, mystical forces of symbolism. Definition by hieroglyphic script delineates a time-space block ancient Egypt as the span 3100 bc-ad 400, in Nile Valley and Delta, from Aswan to the Mediterranean. The block has been expanded to cover prehistoric material culture in the lower Nile Valley, where it is considered ancestral to ancient Egypt, and to adjacent areas where ancient Egyptian script is found— eastern and western Egyptian deserts, Nubia to the south in the Nile Valley and adjacent deserts, and Sinai to the east, with more limited distribution of hieroglyphic inscriptions across southwest Asia and Mediterranean islands and coasts.
In general, a linguistic definition of ancient Egypt provides a clear criterion and so a clear object of study. The focus on writing has brought remarkable advances, particularly in the privileged domain of literary studies (Loprieno 1996). Yet the discipline has become too easily isolated and lost the advantages of comparative and interdisciplinary study, with surprisingly limited engagement even with the disciplines of linguistics and history. Written sources often interweave with figurative art and can only be understood in architectural context, and philological Egyptologists have often included study of visual arts. Nevertheless, despite remarkable studies within Egyptology, no developed contribution can be found within art history, perhaps the result of too little sustained contact with art historians.
The extent of disciplinary isolation can be exaggerated, and the problem is not confined to Egyptology (archaeology and ancient history Sauer 2004; and anthropology Gosden 1999). Although Egyptology and archaeology tend to practice mutual exclusion, some archaeological expeditions in Egypt have introduced current archaeological theory into Nile Valley fieldwork (Wendrich 2010). The inclusion of prehistoric Egypt into many Egyptological departments and conferences has allowed greater contact with archaeology and anthropology (Wengrow
2006) . In some countries, there are also strong links between Egyptology and religious studies (West Germany after World War II, the Netherlands, where Egyptology sometimes belongs within theology departments).
If these links all tend to remain within Eurocentric philosophical frames, that itself is a general problem in interdisciplinarity. From its service in colonialism, anthropology developed the strongest self-critical debate, with insights of great potential for the future of Egyptology and archaeology (Asad 1973; Fabian 1983,
2007) . Self-critique holds the power to return beyond the disciplines to their more humane motivation, a description of a society where we seek to understand rather than to control another, aware that understanding only avoids control when resistance is possible from the other side. In his 1940 Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin warned that even the dead are not safe from lethal impositions of the present (translation Benjamin 1968 [1940]). The moment of danger does not pass. If we aim to hear, as well as study, past people of Egypt during its centuries with written evidence in Egyptian scripts, the most secure path may be within comparative social sciences, incorporating the advances in understanding provided from philology. In this approach, the study of religious practice or ideas about life can start as an open source-grounded effort to recognize what members of that society marked as distinctive and how—whether or not that corresponds to religion within our own understanding of societies.
Egyptologists prioritize written sources in their own writing about ancient Egyptian religion, perhaps because their questions and assumptions over religion require narrative evidence. Despite the anticlerical Republicanism of early nineteenth-century philologists including Champollion, the first question in religious studies of ancient Egypt came to be, did they believe in One God (monotheism) or many (polytheism)? In answering this anachronistic question, the researcher would extract from collections of written sources the evidence for or against monotheism. Fitzenreiter emphasizes how, whether consciously or not, the models for the approach were scripture and theological commentary as developed in and for monotheistic religions of the book. In prominent sources, ancient writings combine with images are strongly framed by monumental architecture, the principal home of inscriptions and images from ancient Egypt. However, art and architecture did not provide ready verbal answers to such questions as the creation of the world, or the relation to divinity. Instead, these answers were sought in narratives of deities, in manuals for rites, or in hymns and prayers. The work of Jan Assmann stands out for the way he questions what religion means in the context of ancient Egypt and for his close attention to the specific context of each piece of writing and to changing contexts over time. Relatively few studies have started from a wider context as in landscape archaeology, but this aspect is receiving more study now (Effland and Effland 2010; Jeffreys 2010). Similarly, few general accounts of ancient Egyptian religion start from settlement evidence, outside the monumental frame. Nor, where monuments form part of the living landscape, have we yet considered the impact in practice of a monument or inscription on what might be called, following the historian-sociologist Michel de Certeau, the daily invention of each social life (de Certeau 1980).
World History
