188 Jennifer Gates-Foster
On this object, we are presented with the image of an Egyptian burial rite superim-
posed over an offering scene in an Achaemenid Persian style, conveying the same kind
of duality as the deceased’s parentage. The upper register contains a standard Egyptian
funerary scene with the mummified dead lying on a lion-bier with Isis, Nephthys, and
Anubis in attendance (Johnson 1999; Mathieson et al. 1995; Wasmuth 2010). In the
lower register, a bearded, enthroned figure in Persian dress raises a phiale to his lips with
one hand and holds a lotus in the other. He is seated before two offering tables and atten-
dants wearing long tunics. The meaning and cultural origins of this scene are debated.
Wasmuth (2009, 2010) argues that the enthroned figure is the deceased receiving offer-
ings, a scene well known from Pharaonic and Late Period contexts, in this case fitted with
details that suggest a Persian association for the deceased. Miller persuasively interprets
the lower scene as having its roots in images of Near Eastern offering scenes derived
from Assyrian types and attested in Persian glyptic (2011). Surely, though, there is more
than cultural adjacency here, as this object evokes kinship and homeland(s) through a
deliberate engagement with imagery that highlights the deceased’s identification with
meaningful ritual in both the Achaemenid Persian and Egyptian spheres. Notably, other
kinds of evidence (language, priestly office, onomastics) for the use of ethnic categories
in Persian-period Egypt suggests a kind of radical continuity under the Persians with
the impact of Persian rule quite limited in many respects (Johnson 1999; Briant and
Chauveau 2009). This disjuncture highlights the critical role of material culture in illumi-
nating ethnic and cultural discourses, however ambiguous they might be, in communities
impacted by the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
Conclusion
Assessing the saliency of concepts such as ethnicity or cultural identity in lands impacted
by the Achaemenid Persian Empire remains a challenge. While we can observe a dialogue
around identity, possibly ethnic or cultural identity, in the material record (e.g., through
an object such as Djedherbes’ stele), we can, at the same time, recognize the enormous
challenges in assessing the specific and contextual meaning of elements that carried the
symbolic capital of ethnic or cultural association. In the case of the Achaemenid Persian
Empire, this difficulty is thrown in to stark relief by the consistent and ubiquitous ref-
erences to the subject peoples of the empire in the ideological framing of the imperial
project as a whole. The distance between these two spheres is not likely to be bridged,
making it all the more important that we remain sensitive to the articulation and nego-
tiation of identity at the local level while at the same time recognizing the incredible
complexity of the ethnic explanation and enumeration of empire as articulated from
the center.
NOTE(^1) The system used to denote Old Persian inscriptions uses standard designations devel-
oped by R. G. Kent (1961). Translations in this chapter are taken from Lecoq’s recent
edition of the inscriptions (1997) unless otherwise noted.