Niv Allon

Niv Allon is an Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He was received his PhD in Egyptology from Yale University in 2014. Before joining the Museum, Niv took part in an international project on classification and classifying systems, and was awarded a Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. Niv’s scholarship probes the nexus of visual studies and textual analysis, investigating how art, sign, and language interact. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between the military and the visualization of literacy in New Kingdom Egypt. In addition, he is the co-author of a book on ancient Egyptian scribes.
Niv obtained a BA in Judaic studies and Biblical studies (2006) from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, where he also finished his MA (2008) under the supervision of Professor Orly Goldwasser. His master’s thesis looked into the syncretism between Baal and Seth and the conceptual changes regarding Seth as reflected in the ancient Egyptian classifier system. His research interests include questions concerning language ideology and language use and their applicability to ancient cultures. He is also engaged in a study of ancient Egyptian scribal culture throughout history, and in comparison to other pre-modern cultures. Furthermore, he has a general interest in critical approaches to philology and in the intersection of intellectual history and Egyptology. Part of his research has focused on the phenomenon of classifiers in ancient Egyptian. He participated in the research project “Stability and adaptation of classification systems in a cross-cultural perspective,” and in a research group of the German Israeli foundation “Ancient Egyptian Classifiers in Diachronic Perspective,” under the direction of Professor Frank Kammerzell, Humboldt Universität, and Professor Orly Goldwasser.