Building Ideas out of Wood. What Ancient Egyptian Funerary ‘Models’ Tell Us about Thought and Communication

Bibliographic Data

ID6043840
AuthorsCamilla Di Biase-Dyson (0000-0001-9230-4762, Macquarie University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume33
Issue3
Pages413-429
Publication date2023-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCambridge Archaeological Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0959-7743 • E-ISSN: 1474-0540
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0959774322000385
OpenAlexW4312069952
LanguageEN
References cited34

This paper unpacks the cognitive processes potentially involved in comprehending funerary ‘models’ from ancient Egypt. These objects comprise small scenes, usually made of wood, which have been found in burial chambers of pharaonic-era tombs. After considering the fittingness of the term ‘model’, the paper illustrates how a cognitive approach might better help us understand the purported functionality of these objects than has hitherto been the case. This approach, grounded in distributed cognition, draws on semiotics, figurative thought and communication theory and considers the priorities of both the theoretical sender and the theoretical receiver. The perspective of the sender comprises what could actually be built, given the confines of material, size, space and budget. The perspective of the receiver is tied to the factors that guarantee intelligibility, such as cultural primaries, medial awareness and aesthetic priming. It is argued that many of the cognitive processes driving comprehension may be based on transfer processes transcending culture and aesthetics, such as metonymy and metaphor, which occur both in the linguistic and the visual modality. In this way, we can ground discussions of model production and use in more fine-grained theoretical and methodological frameworks and achieve new insights into the communicative power of these objects

Aesthetics · Art · Cognition · Cognitive linguistics · Cognitive science · Communication source · Comprehension · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Metaphor · Polysemy · Semiotics · Sociology · Visual arts · Vocabulary · Categorization, perception, and language · Computer Science · History · Language and cultural evolution · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology