Commodity Branding and Textual Potmarks: Three Bread Mould Intaglios from Tell Gabbara

Abstract

Departing from the traditional approaches taken toward ancient Egyptian potmark interpretation, this paper draws on modern conventions of commodity branding to show how internally placed textual markings on bread moulds functioned as brands for marking the surfaces of select loaves at Tell Gabbara during the late Second Dynasty. Specific properties of three potmarks are examined with the aims of elucidating their brand characteristics and showing how they might have functioned in diverse capacities simultaneously, serving not only as linguistically based messages, but also as logos. Furthermore, the ability of bread brands to convey a unified message to members of a blended literate and non-literate workforce is assessed briefly through multidisciplinary findings from fields such as marketing, psycholinguistics, and clinical neuropsychology. The author suggests that these disciplines have the potential to inform and transform our perceptions of the cognitive capabilities of illiterate people with regard to negotiating the messages inherent in early Egyptian brand markings.