Populating Middle Kingdom fauna: inclusion and seclusion of zoological iconographic motifs in the material culture

The first part of the article aims at discussing an ambiguous contextual synchronisms between two categories of artifacts diagnostic for the Middle Kingdom material culture: miniatures made in faience and ivory tusks decorated with carved images. These two types of objects have been often paired together in Egyptological literature, as they were occasionally found in the same archaeological contexts. However, their iconographic elements are completely separate: the ivory tusks show an intense focus on a wide range of fauna featured by a particular ferocity and inclination to kill, while the faience figurines are more shifted towards domestic and harmless zoological elements. The second part of the article aims at dissecting the mechanisms behind the inclusion and seclusion of their zoological (and human) iconographic elements. The fauna and the hybrid compositions related to the ideology of the uppermost levels of society seem to have been almost systematically excluded from the faience figurine corpus, while their focus is arranged around the natural environment of marshes and swamps, the farming environment interacting with domestic and wild animals, where the figure of the herdsman plays a key role. The author attempts to reconnect the environment of the faience figurines into a broader social setting, outlined in some literary and folk texts: the ‘Tale of the Herdsman’, ‘The Journey of the Lybian Goddess’, and pre-Islamic Berber tales about a being called tamza (Islamic ghoul).