The art of forgetting - a Memory in Antiquity workshop

Birmingham-Leiden Strategic Collaboration Fund: Memory in Antiquity

Ten workshop participants from Leiden, Birmingham, the UK and Egypt will focus on material and linguistic aspects of the process of forgetting. Exploring themes such as iconoclasm, damnatio memoriae, and how events are ‘written out’ of historical narratives, forgetting will be characterised as a crucial practice to understand the past and the present.

Given the background and expertise of the two PIs, the initial workshops outlined will have a clear focus on Egyptological research, with the intention to act as a pilot project to test the feasibility of the group. Invited colleagues from neighbouring disciplines such as Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Ancient History, Archaeology, Art History and Middle Eastern Studies will contextualise the Egyptological cases studies. 

This project will establish a firm connection between both universities. These workshops seek to establish a firm connection between both universities with a view to develop join research and teaching activities around the theme of memory in the ancient world

Thursday 24 April 2025 – Alan Walters Building 103 (SR 1)

14.00-14.15 Introduction

14.15-15.15 Heritage and forgetting in post-war Jaffna, Sri Lanka – Ruth Young, University of Leicester (keynote)

15.15-16.00 Coffee break

16:00-16:30 Forgetting sacred sites: the tension in Biblical accounts between licensed and unlicensed sanctuaries – Jonathan Stökl, Leiden University

16:30-17:00 Christian iconoclasm in eighth-century Palestine and the censoring of the late Roman past – Dan Reynolds, University of Birmingham

17.00-18.30 Reception

Friday 25 – Alan Walters Building 103 (SR 1)

10.00-10.30 Forgetting, remembering and creating the past in medieval Iceland – Chris Callow, University of Birmingham

10.30-11.00 Hieroglyphic palaeography of the sun-disc sign in the Amarna Texts (1352-1327 BC): a forgotten aspect of the Amarna period – Sherouk Shehada, Helwan University

11.00-11.45 Coffee break

11:45-12.30 Visit to the Cadbury Research Library for speakers

12.30-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-14.00 Forgotten habits - funerary epigraphy before and after the fall of Palmyra in 273 CE – Nolke Tasma, Leiden University

14.00-16.30 Discussion with short presentations on

• Forgetting to remember: added burials and the slow transformation of memory at QH25/26 in Qubbet al-Hawā’ – Reuben Hutchinson-Wong, University of Birmingham
• ‘Recollections may vary’: constructing the res publica and altered/alternative memories – Hannah Cornwell, University of Birmingham
• Forgetting Iran’s Turkic literary past – Ferenc Csirkés, University of Birmingham
• Remembering and forgetting – establishing a local elite at Tell el-Dab’a/Avaris – Miriam Müller, Leiden University
• ‘And there was no one who would remember it’: technologies of remembrance as social reciprocity – Leire Olabarria, University of Birmingham

Abstracts

Heritage and forgetting in post-war Jaffna, Sri Lanka – Ruth Young, University of Leicester

Sri Lanka is a country very rich in heritage and archaeology, with a major industry in heritage tourism based on a number of monumental elite sites linked to either royalty or Buddhist elites, or both. However, these sites represent heritages of the Sinhalese majority, while sites that are relevant to Tamils (the country’s largest minority) are largely absent in official narratives.  The long Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) fought between the government and Tamil nationalists (primarily the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam or LTTE) entrenched social, political and heritage divisions.  Memorialisation in the post-war period in the north has been very telling, with deliberate removal of LTTE memorials and very one-sided erection of official memorials.  These moves are all very much part of what can be understood as a determined policy of forgetting those who supported and fought for the LTTE and Tamil independence.  However, a new development in the form of a low-key Peace Gallery is a step towards formally challenging the forgetting.  In this presentation I would like to work through some of the material culture around forgetting in Jaffna and northern Sri Lanka, and then think about how this Peace Gallery offers hope, but also the major challenges it faces.   

Forgetting sacred sites: the tension in Biblical accounts between licensed and unlicensed sanctuaries – Jonathan Stökl, Leiden University

There is a tension in the Biblical material between the claim of a single legitimate sanctuary in Jerusalem and textual traces of other sanctuaries. In addition, archaeological excavations have demonstrated the existence of other temples. In this paper I will look at three categories of temples: 1) those that are so forgotten in the text that modern scholars were surprised when they were excavated (e.g., Motza, Elephantine, Arad); 2) temples that left traces in the Biblical record (e.g., Beer Sheva, Bethel); and 3) the Jerusalem temple of which the biblical authors approve. These classification in these groups is not as strict as it may seem, but it facilitates an analysis of different kinds of forgetting at play. 

Christian iconoclasm in eighth-century Palestine and the censoring of the late Roman past – Dan Reynolds, University of Birmingham

Around the second quarter of the eighth century, Christian communities across the territories of early Islamic Palestine and the Transjordan engaged in a systematic removal of images from their churches. Motifs of animals, birds and humans, rendered in mosaic and stone carving, were systematically removed from the floors and furnishings of church interiors, replaced by motifs of plants, or left in 'pixelated' form as a permanent reminder of their removal. The cause for this region-wide phenomenon remains difficult to identify, and still the subject of much debate among scholars. This discussion will offer an introduction to this phenomenon and reflect on its value in identifying a shift in Christian attitudes to the spaces of worship and identity that they had inherited from their late Roman predecessors.

Forgetting, remembering and creating the past in medieval Iceland – Chris Callow, University of Birmingham

Writing the early history of Iceland presents a particular set of problems for any would-be historian. The island was settled from scratch from just after 870CE but texts presenting Iceland's early history only date from after 1100CE. Narratives of different kinds (The Book of Icelanders, The Book of Settlements, Sagas of Icelanders) present that past in a variety of forms of narrative, usually centred on individual settlers, most of them from Norway who settle in identifiable locations in Iceland. This paper discusses how and why these texts write about the past and highlights the ways in which place-names served as inspiration for medieval Icelandic writers often in the absence of genuine place-name lore and tradition. Medieval Iceland is arguably a society which had a far less stable historical tradition than has often been argued.

Hieroglyphic palaeography of the sun-disc sign in the Amarna Texts (1352-1327 BC): a forgotten aspect of the Amarna period – Sherouk Shehada, Helwan University

The reign of king Akhenaten from the 18th Dynasty is characterized by many changes in religion, art and philology (David 2021; Arp-Neumann 2020). The changes in philology include innovations in grammar and syntax, such as the verbal system (Shehada 2024, 197–230). The period featured also new ways of shaping hieroglyphic signs, in particularly divine determinatives (Goldwasser 2010: 160–161; Redford 1980: 28; Redford 1976: 53). One of the most interesting examples is the sun-disc determinative, N8, which occurs in many different texts and is written with a number of variants (Shehada 2025). It appears in many words in both royal and non-royal sources. The new ways of depicting the iconography of the solar-disc and the sun-disc determinative are significant and the relationships between them have not been discussed in detail. We need to consider the developing relationship between the image, the sign and the context in which they were utilized to deciphering the neglected elements in the historical writing texts. This research examines hieroglyphic texts from Amarna to (a) figure out the reason different variants were used for the sun-disc sign and to (b) explore its relation with the iconographic depictions. These will offer insights into the organization and methods of the makers of hieroglyphic texts and visual culture. It is this angle that leads us to a better understanding of the interactions between people, natural life, objects and the sociocultural relations inside one specific place in Egypt during the second millennium BC. 

Forgotten habits - funerary epigraphy before and after the fall of Palmyra in 273 CE – Nolke Tasma, Leiden University

The first conquest and following destruction of Palmyra under emperor Aurelian in 273 AD marked the end of the political and social power of the Palmyrene elite. In this paper, I will discuss the changes in Palmyrene funerary epigraphy after this event and show how the epigraphic habit fell out of use and was eventually forgotten. The different disappearing, surviving and emerging epigraphic customs tell us about the wishes of the Palmyrene upper classes, which disappeared from power after this event. These results will also be compared to funerary epigraphy from the Palmyrene diaspora, which also functioned outside of the direct influence of the Palmyrene ruling classes. This allows for a new view on the development of Palmyrene funerary and epigraphic customs, by focusing on the influence and impact of the Palmyrene upper elite on the conventions in Aramaic and Greek funerary epigraphy.

Forgetting to remember: added burials and the slow transformation of memory at QH25/26 in Qubbet al-Hawā’ – Reuben Hutchinson-Wong, University of Birmingham

The iterative process of remembering involves the iterative process of forgetting. The high number of added burials at QH25/26, most of which do not have names associated with them anymore, offers the opportunity to consider the act of iterative forgetting. With each new burial and subsequent adjustment to mortuary cult within the tomb, interactions changed as time went on. Aspects of people slowly became forgotten through these interactions as acts of iterative remembering took place. Over time, as older participants passed away and newer ones entered the community of memory, those involved in the tandem practices of mortuary cult and added burial affected the arrangement of personal and group memories in new ways for the community’s purpose. All burials, whether named or unnamed, adjusted to new relational realities as the community aged, practices of burial and mortuary cult continued, and the creation new connections in place. Social practice, like traditions and mortuary cults, helped mediate the formation and reformation of memory. These people necessarily became forgotten over time as they became remembered collectively by the community as ancestors. Forgetting therefore played an essential function for a group’s ongoing remembrance of their past.

‘Recollections may vary’: constructing the res publica and altered/alternative memories – Hannah Cornwell, University of Birmingham

While forgetting is often about the removal or absence of memory, the role of selective reorganisation of memory and the potential of alter memories is significant in reflecting on the construction of history and ideas of the Roman res publica, particularly during and following periods of crisis and upheaval. The erasure of members of the civic community judged to be ‘enemies of the state’ (iudicare hostes) was initiated through the act of writing their names on a list (proscribing): forgetting required acts of creation as much as erasure. For ancient Rome, the urban fabric was an expression of the health of its political institutions. This intimate association of the built environment with political discourse and social memory offered ways to forgot and replace past versions of the state through acts of creation and construction.

Forgetting Iran’s Turkic literary past – Ferenc Csirkés, University of Birmingham

While Iran is always associated with the Persian language, it is a commonplace that the historical territory of Iran was dominated by various Turkic dynasties for about a millennium from the late tenth to the early twentieth century, and that Iran today has a very sizeable Turkic minority. It is less well known that this Turkophone population has had a robust literary culture for over half of that millennium. This oblivion is largely due to the institutions and nationalist policies of the modern Iranian nation state. However, one might also want to ask if the premodern social order, termed amir-‘ayan system by Marshall Hodgson – the symbiosis of Turkic aristocracy holding military power and the Persophone urban elite dominating the bureaucracy and the judiciary – also had something to do with this amnesia or neglect.

Remembering and forgetting – establishing a local elite at Tell el-Dab’a/Avaris – Miriam Müller, Leiden University

My presentation in Leiden discussed the roots for the enigmatic Hyksos culture in Egypt. Case studies from the site of Tell el-Dab’a/Avaris in the Eastern Nile Delta illustrated a mixed material culture revealing potential memories of a faraway past. After establishing a new home at Avaris, this mixed Egyptian-Asiatic, partially migrant community experienced several radical breaks with the much more recent past. These stand in stark contrast to long-term developments of social memory and the building of family histories at the site. Symbols of upcoming elites such as the statue of a high dignitary, mayoral residences and a palace were subject to deliberate destruction over several generations while also unforeseeable events such as an epidemic left a mark on the local population. In this short presentation, I will assess the interplay of these acts of remembering and forgetting actively paving the ground for the establishment of a ruling elite at the site and eventually over a large part of Egypt.

‘And there was no one who would remember it’: technologies of remembrance as social reciprocity – Leire Olabarria, University of Birmingham

Deliberate destruction is often linked with processes of forgetting as a punishment, but the inexorable passage of time was also perceived as a danger that could lead to damage and loss in antiquity. In order to ensure a continuation of memory, ancient Egyptians actively deployed a variety of strategies of commemoration, which, following archaeologist Andrew Jones, I refer to as ‘technologies of remembrance’. In this presentation, I introduce a case study from Middle Kingdom Egypt that will highlight the importance of monumental display as a tool to prevent oblivion. In particular, I will explore the notion of social reciprocity and the role it played in the sustenance of memory.