Foodways and cultural entanglements in New Kingdom Nubia

Foodways play an important role in both ancient and modern societies, particularly in the context of imperial expansions like the New Kingdom Egyptian occupation of Nubia after the conquest of Kush. On the one hand, access to certain foods and knowledge of and the means to properly deploy dining etiquette provide ways to emphasise the differential status of members of the colonial regime and its local collaborators. But in both elite and non-elite contexts, foodways also provide insights into the logics of adoption, adaptation, and rejection that characterise Dietler’s consumptionbased model of cultural entanglement. Entanglement complicates the binary dichotomy of Egyptian dominance and Nubian or Kushite subordination, instead allowing us to document mutual influence by tracing the different cultural threads that entangled to produce a new fabric that was itself dynamic, evolving over time as individual tastes shifted over the course of the colonial encounter. This paper focuses on domestic foodways, while also considering funerary and religious evidence. An ongoing re-analysis of data on intercultural interaction between colonists and local populations from Askut in Lower Nubia and recent excavation at Tombos in Upper Nubia informs a discussion of the intercultural social role and politics of taste within the colony. Keywords: Practice theory, colonialism, meals, feasting, taste, Askut, Tombos, Nubia