ABSTRACT
Identity is socially constructed and a subjective collective of sub-categories, including ethnicity, religion, race, gender, age, profession, status, etc. Identity is constructed through aligning oneself with some, and differentiating that group from others. In the case of ancient Egypt, an overwhelming variety of titles and texts dealing with identity groups from foreigners to professions to gender has resulted in the neat and orderly partitioning of a society that was certainly not so clear in reality. Ancient Egyptian individuals very commonly had more than a single title, and beyond those social markers were also distinguished by gender, age, and place of birth. Ancient disciplines like Egyptology and Classics, founded during these colonial periods, “unconsciously imposed the attitudes and assumptions of ancient colonists, filtered and largely reconstituted through modern colonial ideology and practice and embodied as part of the Western intellectual habitus, back onto the ancient situation”.
