Event: WEDS TALK; Crafting Communities into Contact: Seals, Scripts, and the Making of an East Mediterranean Exchange System (ca. 2350-1450 BCE)

ABSTRACT: The late third to early second millennium BCE is characterized by the unprecedented movement of goods, people, and ideas alongside the development and spread of shared social practices and innovations in the east Mediterranean. It’s against this backdrop that we see the widespread appearance of emergent writing systems with (semi-)pictographic scripts and so-called “pseudo scripts”, many of which share similar graphemes and almost all of which appear on stamp seal amulets. Traditional scholarship has sought to understand the extent to which the Egyptian writing system impacted on local script formation, limiting stimuli to writing practices from one geographic region. This talk takes a craft-centered interregional approach, evaluating these scripts in relation to one another and proposing they evolved, in part, alongside a shared visual language reflecting a common repertoire of symbols and practices marking membership in a transregional community of exchange.

BIO: Nadia is currently an NEH Fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and a research associate at the University of Zurich. She was a postdoctoral researcher on the Swiss National Science Foundation funded Sinergia project, “Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant” (2021–2023) after receiving her Ph.D. in Levantine Archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines craft production in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the identities and embodied knowledge of producers and the contexts in which innovations arose. Nadia has co-edited several volumes including Ancient Egyptian Society (2022, Routledge), two special issues of Near Eastern Archaeology (2023–2024), and two edited volumes on stamp seal production and typology (forthcoming, Peeters). She is currently working on a Cambridge University Press Element titled Social Identity in Ancient Egypt, as well as a book exploring the role of craftspeople in the making of an east Mediterranean exchange system.