Depicting the others: Late Bronze Age Southern Levant’s cultural identity and adornment from the Egyptian view. Reality vs Perception

Abstract

The Egyptian presence in the Southern Levant during the Late Bronze Age is to be considered as rooted and capillary on the territory. Nevertheless, by excluding some written sources as the Letters of el-Amarna, it is practically impossible to evaluate local perceptions and representations of who populated the region during this period. In fact, Southern Levant presents an extreme lack of human depictions and iconographies, thus Egyptian direct witnesses become very useful to provide a vivid picture of society and its prominent historical protagonists. “Asiatics” depictions on reliefs, paintings and Egyptian artifacts, give us a quite punctual idea of who the Levantines were and what they wore during this period. The paper means to focus on the analysis of the personal ornaments by which “Asians” are identified and represented, as well as on the function of ethnic, cultural and identity markers these items represent in the depictions. An iconographic and stylistic analysis will try to show the association between images and objects through material culture findings in and extra context, though bearing in mind the asymmetric vision the Egyptians had in perceiving themselves and representing other people, sometimes far more distant than it appeared.