Not marginal, but marginalised: the 'Pan-Grave' archaeological culture, pharaonic Egypt, and Egyptology

This paper focusses on the so-called “Pan-Grave” archaeological culture, and the extent to which communities attributed to it can or should be considered “marginal” based on the available archaeological and historical evidence. It will be argued that communities that archaeologists identify as “Pan-Grave” were likely to have been small and hence a minority in terms of population size, but that the wide distribution of evidence suggests that “Pan-Grave culture” was a recognisable component of the ancient Egyptian socio-cultural landscape. The frequency and variety of evidence for contact and exchange between the Pan-Grave and Egyptian cultural spheres points towards close social ties rather than Pan-Grave being marginal to the ancient Egyptian “core”. At the same time, it is proposed that Pan-Grave culture—and Nubian cultures in general—have been marginalised by Egyptology as an academic discipline, which has a tradition of implicitly (and explicitly) using ancient rhetoric to justify its own conception of ancient Egyptian dominance. It is also argued that a re-framing of “Pan-Grave” communities as an integral part of the cultural fabric of pharaonic Egypt would encourage Egyptology as a discipline to question its own perception of what defines “Egyptian” from both ancient and academic perspectives.