Overlapping and Contradictory Narratives in Ancient Egyptian Visual Programs Jennifer Babcock, Ph.D. To modern, Western audiences, narratives are typically understood to be sequential in nature with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This bias toward linear, chronological narrative construction is reflected in the scholarship about visual and literary narratives in ancient Egyptian culture, which affects our understanding of how ancient Egyptian stories and images should be read. While there are ancient Egyptian narratives that fit a modern and Western narrative model in which events happen sequentially, the ancient Egyptian culture typically demonstrates a preference for nonlinear narratives and multiple narratives, even if they are contradictory. (SIDE) While writing my dissertation about anthropomorphized animals depicted in New Kingdom figured ostraca, I considered the ostraca’s role as works of art in and of themselves as well as their possible narrative function, which raised my interest in ancient Egyptian visual construction on a broader scale as well. (SLIDE) Like other scholars, such as Emma Brunner-Traut and Patrick Houlihan, I initially considered the possibility that the sequential images of the ostraca’s papyri counterparts, which are housed in the British Museum, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, may reflect a narrative that can be read linearly, meaning from left to right or right to left. (SLIDE)I then questioned whether or not the ostraca could be Dzreaddz as well, considering if the ostraca were intended to mimic the papyri by being laid out in the same pictorial sequence (SLIDE), if each