Populating middle kingdom fauna: Inclusion and exclusion of zoological iconographic motifs in its material culture

The first part of this article aims at discussing an ambiguous contextual synchronism between two categories of artefacts diagnostic of the Middle Kingdom material culture: miniatures made of faience and ivory tusks decorated with carved images. These two types of objects have often been paired together in Egyptological literature, as they were occasionally found in the same archaeological contexts, although their iconographic elements seem to be completely separate: the ivory tusks feature a fauna with particular ferocity and inclination to kill, while the faience figurines are more shifted towards domestic and harmless zoological specimens. The second part of the article aims at dissecting the mechanisms behind the inclusion and exclusion of their zoological (and human) iconographic elements. The fauna 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, swamps and farming. The author attempts to reconnect the environment of the faience figurines with a rural social setting, outlined in some literary and folk texts: the ‘Tale of the Herdsman’, ‘The Journey of the Libyan Goddess’, and pre-Islamic Berber tales about a being called the tamza (Islamic ghoul)