Decoding Signs of Identity

Decoding Signs of Identity is the volume of proceedings resulting
from the symposium with the same name and held in Leiden, 13-15 December
2013, in the framework of the NWO research project 'Symbolizing
Identity: Identity marks and their relation to writing in New Kingdom
Egypt'. The aim of the project, and indeed of the symposium, was to
investigate identity marks of Ancient Egyptian workmen, both in a
specialist, in-depth manner, and in a more general, comparative
perspective. The reader will recognise both of these approaches in the
present collection of papers. In the course of its three sections, the
topic is narrowed down from general considerations and non-Egyptian
cases, to various sorts of Ancient Egyptian identity marks, and finally
to the specific marking system of the royal necropolis workforce of the
Egyptian New Kingdom, which was the core material of the NWO project.
This volume can be considered a follow-up to Pictograms or Pseudo
Script? (EU XXV, 2009), and testifies to the continuing scholarly
interest in systems of identity marks, both in Egyptology and outside.