Preface

From prehistoric figurines and graffiti to modern digital photographs, human beings repeatedly produced images, transforming the world itself into a relentless fabric of images. This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference held at the Institute of Archaeology - UCL, London in 2014 inside the framework of the European project "EPOCHS", with the aim to explore the fertile imaginary world of Middle Bronze Age Egypt (2000-1500 BC). Images do not exist in their ontological isolation, as atomic unity, but they form a complex agency network with other images and with the society that produced them, hence the title "Company of Images". Eighteen papers focus on this intricate web, tackling the topic from different perspectives: material culture, archaeological finds, anthropological and social relations, iconographic representations, and analysis of the written sources, including linguistic approaches. The final goal is to highlight theoretical and methodological issues in order to explore connections between the images and their society, people who created images and who were recursively affected by the images they created.