This volume focuses on the use of multimodal communication strategies in ancient Egypt and Western Asia. It comprises thoroughly revised contributions from an international conference held at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich in 2021. It brings together archaeologists, Assyriologists, and Egyptologists, alongside scholars from contemporary media studies and visual linguistics.
The concept of multimodality serves as a conceptual anchor, enabling insights into the relationships between semiotic codes, sensory modalities, and cognitive processes – past and present. Such a comparative perspective requires a reflection on terminological and theoretical-methodological issues. Several contributions acknowledge the significance of social semiotics in attaining this objective, while others explore sensory experiences and cognitive processes of perception. Detailed case studies investigate a wide range of image- and text-bearing artifacts from ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, emphasizing the deliberate interplay between their visual, verbal, auditory, and tactile aspects. The volume adds a longue durée perspective to recent advances in multimodality studies and provides a fresh and promising angle for future inquiries into ancient material cultures.