The Presences of the Invisible

Towards an Archaeology of Al-Ghaib in the West Bank of Luxor, Egypt

Abstract

For Muslims, belief in the invisible, al-ghaib, constitutes the first and most fundamental commandment: since God is imperceptible to human senses, believing in God necessarily requires belief in the invisible. However, the domain of the invisible and that of the visible do not exist in opposition: rather, they are complementary, with practical impact on the way believers live in and encounter the world. In 2022, the Brazilian Archaeological Program in Egypt started the Project Presences of the Invisible. The objective is to document the encounters, diffractions and processes of materialization of the invisible in the West Bank of Luxor.