De-monumentalising Perceptions of Ancient Architectural Practices

Defining Monuments

Text by YaleNews staff: Lisa Prevost, Peter Cunningham, and Jessica Liu.

Photograph by Patricia Mora Riudavets; licensed use only.

Why are some buildings considered “monumental” — and others not?

The distinction, while commonly used by anthropologists, is not so clear-cut, argues Sergio Alarcón Robledo, a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in a recent paper published in Antiquity.

“There is no consensus on what ‘monumental’ as a characteristic implies,” Robledo writes. “[It] does not describe an objective characteristic inherent to the building, such as a material or a color, but is instead a social construct.”

When architecture as a modern discipline was shaped, Robledo argues, architects deemed certain structures, old and new, as monumental to define a lineage “whose legitimate heirs were architects” — a tactic that conferred authority and exclusivity to their profession. 

Using the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari as a case study, the author explores how this framework has blinded us from relevant aspects of ancient Egyptian architectural practices. Labeling such structures as “monumental,” Robledo argues, “creates a sense of comparability of buildings among populations and periods that betrays the ultimate purpose of [archaeology]: understanding the past in its own context.”