This week was a good one for my project. Not only have I come up with a proposal for my research but I also somewhat formulated the structure of the paper I intend to pursue. My biggest difficulty was not finding sources. It was limiting my options and narrowing my focus. I decided to ask questions that I would not be able to readily pull answers up for. I wanted my research to be into something that might have been overlooked. So I am projecting my research into how death and immortality changed over the thousand+ years of ancient Egypt. Of course the title will be a bit more refined than that. I intend on using different versions of the Book of the Dead that I discovered last year to find changes in the afterlife narrative. With that I want to uncover the reasoning behind these changes being made. Who would benefit from beliefs changing? Why would they change it. To simplify, I am trying to understand the “whisper down the lane” that took place over millennia regarding death and the afterlife.
My story board is a bit rough around the edges so I will talk more about that in class today after some refining. I found a large quantity of books for my research (articles I was not having as much luck for but I will find more to fill some gaps as I go). Something I have not done so much in the past was research the authors themselves to detect any bias or flaws in their approaches to their writing/research. Find any biases is not the ideal goal as this would restrict the sources. However, that would be much better than including a bias source and not acknowledging it. This also pushes me to reflect on my own biases going in to the research that I must be aware of. I need to accept that the answers are not going to jump of the page on a topic so niche. Of course, Ancient Egypt is a rich topic filled with primary sources and secondary research. However, it is up to me, not another author, to navigate these sources to come up with a solid foundation to support my research question and further develop my thesis.
Izzy, a time period of a 1000 years is a lot to cover in one research paper. I know working in the ancient world is a little different, but can you go ahead and spell out the exact date range for us as best you can?