ZOOM ONLY EVENT

Who owns the “truth” about the past? Today’s power struggle between scientific and sensational interpretations of ancient Egypt began with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb a century ago. In recently rediscovered private letters, psychics and tabloid journalists challenged Howard Carter’s authority with dire warnings about the supernatural vengeance that awaited him. The invention of “King Tut’s Curse” reveals the eccentric personalities and toxic rivalries that gave birth to a legend.

Dr Jasmine Day, author of The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World (2006), is an anthropologist and Egyptologist specialising in mummymania, the “mummy’s curse” legend and the ethics of mummy display. She has published papers in Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies (2013), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (2014), Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt (2020), La Collection Jean‑Marcel Humbert (2022), Alternative Egyptology (2024) and in academic and popular Egyptology journals. She has also contributed to the International Congress on Mummy Studies, Tea with the Sphinx and International Society for the Study of Egyptomania conferences and documentaries including Egypt’s Unexplained Files (2019). Day is President of The Ancient Egypt Society of Western Australia Inc.

Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members

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GLASGOW AND ZOOM

Material matters? The ins and outs of three enigmatic Predynastic figurines in The Hunterian, Glasgow.

The Hunterian has in its stores a male and two female figurines created in Egypt in the Predynastic Period (c. 3400 BCE) which are not generally known to scholarship. Research on such figurines has traditionally focused on the meaning of their not-quite human form and their potential religious significance. Thanks to the support of a Chancellor’s Fund award and working with Dr Louisa Campbell in Archaeology and her CHARMS initiative, scientific analysis is underway and might be the key to unlocking some of the figurines’ secrets.

Angela McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Glasgow, based in Classics. Her research focuses on the Egyptian script, but she has worked closely with The Hunterian on their Egyptology collection. She also works in Karnak Temple with the Karnak Graffiti Project.

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GLASGOW AND ZOOM

Double summer lecture.

Alexandria was one of the great cities in the ancient world. Although Alexander the Great had died before the port he had founded could be built, his body was buried there, and it became the capital of the dynasty founded by his general Ptolemy (I), which came to an end with the death of the famous Cleopatra. Her tomb was also in Alexandria (probably!). Over the centuries Alexandria has been the scene of numerous pivotal events in ancient history. Many of its great monuments, including the lighthouse, one of the ancient wonders of the world, have been lost, but traces survived into modern times. Much that remains is now concealed beneath the modern city – Egypt’s second largest – with much more hidden under the waters of the Mediterranean.

Chris Naunton is an Egyptologist and author of Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt (2018), Egyptologists’ Notebooks (2020), and two books for children, Tutankhamun Tells All! (2021) and Cleopatra Tells All! (2022). He frequently appears in television documentaries on ancient Egypt and was Director (CEO) of the Egypt Exploration Society from 2012 to 2016 and President of the International Association of Egyptologists from 2015 to 2019. He lives in London.

Entry: £10

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ZOOM ONLY EVENT

The role of the Moon in Egyptian religious astronomy underwent dramatic shifts in its role and its place in the celestial theology of the day. Over its two-and-a-half-thousand-year journey, the Egyptian moon has carried a complexity of theological meanings. This lecture considers these shifting meanings as an example of the reception of an astronomical phenomenon responding to the changing political and cultural needs of the people of ancient Egypt.

Bernadette Brady holds a PhD in Anthropology (2012) and MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology (2005) and an MA in Egyptology from Manchester University. She is currently a lecturer for the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK. Bernadette was the course director for the 2019 BSS at Luxor on Egyptian Astronomy and has lectured widely on this subject.

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PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT IS NOW ZOOM-ONLY

Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), the Second Astronomer Royal for Scotland and Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, enjoyed a long and productive career, making important contributions to astronomy and other fields. His most enduring contribution to astronomy was demonstrating the superiority of high-altitude, mountain-top sites for making astronomical observations. However, he is most often remembered for his eccentric ideas about the Great Pyramid of Giza. In the early 1860s he became convinced that the dimensions of the Great Pyramid demonstrated that it had been built using a unit of measurement almost equal to the British inch, that it encoded the dimensions of the earth and the solar system, and that consequently its construction was divinely inspired. In order to verify these ideas he travelled to Egypt and carried out a thorough survey of the Pyramid, more accurate than any previous ones, and also photographed the interior, the first successful application of flash photography in the field. Piazzi Smyth’s ideas attracted an enthusiastic group of followers who extended them, maintaining that the interior features of the pyramid encoded predictions of events subsequent to its construction, again by divine inspiration. In his own survey of 1880-82 Flinders Petrie showed that Smyth’s pyramid-inch was erroneous and based on a misunderstanding of the dimensions of the Pyramid. Nonetheless Piazzi Smyth’s ideas continued to attract a committed following for many years. This talk will describe his work on the Great Pyramid and discuss its reception and criticism during the nineteenth century and continuing afterlife through the twentieth century and to the present.

Following retirement Clive Davenhall is now a visitor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, where he was previously a Project Manager and Software Developer in the Wide Field Astronomy Unit, working on star catalogues and astronomical databases. He has a long-standing interest in the history of astronomy and has written and presented talks on this subject. Particular interests include the history of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh and the reception and influence of astronomy on wider society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has degrees from the universities of London and St Andrews, is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Founder Member of the Society for the History of Astronomy and recently became a member of Egyptology Scotland.

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ZOOM ONLY EVENT

Nefertiti's Face: Revisiting Egypt's most Famous Queen. More than three thousand years ago a sculptor working in the royal city of Amarna carved the head of an Egyptian queen. That queen was Nefertiti, consort of the “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten. Plastered and painted, Nefertiti’s bust depicted an extraordinarily beautiful woman. However, Akhenaten’s reign was drawing to an end, and the royal family was soon to be written out of Egypt’s official history. Not long after its creation the stone Nefertiti was locked in a storeroom and forgotten. In 1912 the bust was re-discovered and transported to Germany. Egypt has yielded more than its fair share of artistic masterpieces, but it is difficult to think of another sculpture that has so successfully bridged the gap between the ancient and modern worlds. The timeless beauty of the Nefertiti bust both attracts modern viewers and sparks our imagination, but in so doing it obscures our view of the past and distorts our understanding of the Amarna royal family. Is there really any evidence to suggest that Nefertiti ruled Egypt? In this lecture Professor Joyce Tyldesley explores the creation of a cultural icon, from its ancient origins to its modern context.

Joyce Tyldesley is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester, where she has developed and teaches a suite of online Egyptology programmes. She is also an Honorary Research Associate of the Manchester Museum. Joyce is the author of many books on ancient Egypt, including Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and Tutankhamen's Curse: The Developing History of an Egyptian King, which won the 2014 Felicia A. Holton Book Award given by the Archaeological Institute of America. Her book Nefertiti's Face: The Creation of an Icon was published in 2018, and her most recent book, Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma was published in 2022.

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*** Please note there is a change of date for this lecture. Egyptology Scotland apologises for any inconvenience this may cause. ***

ZOOM ONLY EVENT

Egyptian society is often said to have been divided into social classes, with the pat-people representing the 'elite' and the rekhyt-people being the 'commoners'. Yet an examination of the Egyptian texts reveal that the rekhyt-people are commonly described as performing actions, emotions, and gestures for the benefit of the divine pharaoh and the gods. This lecture will examine when and where these actions were performed, and for whom. Additionally, the use and function of the rekhyt rebus will be analysed in detail. While this motif has previously been identified as an indicator of accessibility, an examination of the distribution of the rebus reveals that it is more often located in areas that were inaccessible to the rekhyt-people.

Dr Ken Griffin is the Cuator of the Egypt Centre, Swansea University. His association with the Egypt Centre first began in 2000 as a volunteer. Over the past two decades, he has been researching the collection, including publishing a number of the objects. Prior to his appointment as the Curator, he was a lecturer in Egyptology at Swansea University. He has participated in excavations in Egypt (Abydos, South Asasif necropolis, Valley of the Kings) and Sudan (Sai Island).

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GLASGOW AND ZOOM

Jane Draycott is a Roman historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen.

She investigates science, technology, and medicine in the ancient world, and is particularly interested in the history and archaeology of medicine; impairment, disability, and prostheses; and botany and horticulture. Recently, she has begun exploring the use (and abuse) of history and archaeology in video games, particularly those set in classical antiquity. She has also long had a special interest in Graeco-Roman Egypt and the Roman client kingdom of Mauretania.

She was awarded a BA (Hons) in Archaeology and Ancient History and an MA in Ancient History from Cardiff University, an MSc in Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology from Cranfield University, and a PhD in Classics from the University of Nottingham. Following the completion of her doctorate, she was awarded two postdoctoral fellowships: Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome and Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow in Classics at the University of Glasgow. Over the last decade, she has worked in academic institutions in the UK and Italy, and excavated sites ranging from Bronze Age villages to First World War trenches across the UK and Europe. She is currently Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University of Glasgow’s Games and Gaming Lab.

Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members

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Ian Mathieson Memorial Lecture

Due to industrial action affecting National Rail services, this event is now ZOOM only.

To mark the return of Manchester Museum's critically acclaimed international touring exhibition 'Golden Mummies of Egypt', curator Campbell Price explores some of the concepts central to the show. Mummification is less about preserving the deceased as they were when they were alive and rather about transforming them into a divine image. Through gilded masks but also the so-called 'Faiyum Portraits', an ideal face is given to the divinised deceased. Often our modern assumptions about images and our quest for the 'real' prevent us from understanding this process of transformation.

Dr Campbell Price is Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester. He is curator of the exhibition 'Golden Mummies of Egypt', and author of an accompanying book. Campbell is Honorary Research Fellow in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, and currently Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Egypt Exploration Society.

Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members

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ZOOM ONLY EVENT

"Jolly Good Trick(s)": Ancient Egyptian Magic in Late Victorian Popular Culture

In 1890 the spiritualist medium Elizabeth d'Esperance claimed to materialise a seven-foot lily in a darkened séance room, with a piece of mummy bandage wrapped about its stem. Spirit photographers alleged to have captured ancient Egyptian presences in their images, including Cleopatra VII. On stage, magicians were performing in venues where neo-pharaonic architecture lent an air of mystery and gravitas to the proceedings. Meanwhile, the popular novelist Edith Nesbit consulted E. A. Wallis Budge, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, to aid her in infusing her novel, The Story of the Amulet (1906), with Egyptologically-informed details. In this talk, we will take stock of the varied ways in which ancient Egyptian magic manifested in the popular culture of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, revealing how Egypt was used as a marker of authenticity and of the possibilities of a very real occult power that continued to manifest in the modern world.

Eleanor Dobson is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (UCL Press, 2022).

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GLASGOW AND ZOOM

The Nubian Pharaohs of Egypt: For a few decades during the 8th to 7th centuries BC, there was a remarkable reversal of the age-old imperial domination of Nubia by Egypt. In the wake of the fragmentation of the Egyptian state during the 8th century, the Kushite state that had evolved in Nubia since Egyptian withdrawal at the beginning of the 11th century expanded northwards, ultimately absorbing the south of Egypt, including Thebes itself. Having established themselves as overlords of the various regional rulers in Egypt, the Nubian pharaohs led a national revival in Egypt, until an Assyrian onslaught drove them back into Nubia, where their composite of Egyptian and Nubian culture would survive into the 4th century AD.

The Royal Cemeteries of Kush: The last Egyptian pharaoh to own a pyramid had been Ahmose I, back at the beginning of the New Kingdom. However, the Kushite kings revived their use for their own burials, and they would continue to house the bodies of Nubian royalty down to the very end of the Kushite kingdom in the 4th century AD. This talk explores the royal cemeteries of Upper Nubia, and how the tombs and their contents illustrate the long-term cultural and political entanglement of Egypt and its southern neighbour.

Professor Aidan Dodson, University of Bristol: Aidan Dodson has taught Egyptology at the University of Bristol, UK, since 1996, and has been honorary full Professor of Egyptology since 2018. A graduate of Liverpool and Cambridge Universities, he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a former Chairman of the Egypt Exploration Society. The author of some 25 books and over 400 articles and reviews, The Nubian Pharaohs of Egypt: their lives and afterlives is due to be published by the American University in Cairo Press at the end of 2023.

Entry: £10

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Double summer lecture.

Please note that this is now a ZOOM ONLY event.

The ROYAL MUMMIES: How is it that we have the bodies of so many important people – kings, queens and others – of the 17th to 21st Dynasties, but hardly any from before or after that time? The answer is an incredible story of tombs, robbers, a country desperate for cash (in ancient times!), and two of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries ever made…

Dr Chris Naunton is an Egyptologist, writer and broadcaster. He has published a number of articles and books on the history of Egyptology, most recently Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2018) and Egyptologists' Notebooks (Thames & Hudson, 2020), and presented many related television documentaries, including Tut’s Treasures – Hidden Secrets (Channel 5, 2018, National Geographic/Disney+), Egypt’s Lost Pyramid (Channel 4, 2019) and King Tut’s Last Mission (Channel 5, 2020). He worked for many years at the Egypt Exploration Society, London, acting as its director between 2012 and 2016. From 2015 to 2019 he was President of the International Association of Egyptologists and in 2016 he became director of the Robert Anderson Trust, a charity that provides support for young scholars visiting London to further their studies and research.

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EDINBURGH AND ZOOM.

Giovanni Battista Belzoni was a poor boy whose adolescence was shaped by the upheavals and uncertainties of the Napoleonic wars. Having worked as a circus strong man, he came late and by accident to Egyptology where, using engineering skills honed in the theatre, he masterminded the transport of some of Egypt’s heaviest monuments to European museum. Today Belzoni is generally relegated to the rank of treasure-seeker and tomb robber. This lecture will re-examine his achievements and re-consider his contribution to Egyptology.

Joyce Tyldesley is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester, where she has developed and teaches a suite of online Egyptology programmes. She is also an Honorary Research Associate of the Manchester Museum. Joyce is the author of many books on ancient Egypt, including Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and Tutankhamen's Curse: The Developing History of an Egyptian King, which won the 2014 Felicia A. Holton Book Award given by the Archaeological Institute of America. Her most recent book, Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma was published in 2022.

Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members

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ZOOM ONLY EVENT

Egyptian religious astronomy was driven by a divine sky populated with sky deities. One of the earliest of these was the goddess Nut. She was given a voice and character in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom. However, she appears to have shifted her role in Egyptian thinking by the New Kingdom. At this time, she became central in the astronomical ceilings of that period while also, through sun, sky and floods, drew together Karnak Temple, Deir el Bahari and the Valley of the Kings into a sacred landscape.

 Bernadette Brady holds a PhD in Anthropology (2012) and MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology (2005) and an MA in Egyptology from Manchester University. She is currently a lecturer for the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK. Bernadette was the course director for the 2019 BSS at Luxor on Egyptian Astronomy and has lectured widely on this subject.

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ZOOM ONLY EVENT.

The Rosetta Stone is most famous for its role in the decipherment of Hieroglyphs while the text of the inscription is often ignored. Unbeknownst to most, the events referenced in three scripts are one of the primary sources we have for the Great Rebellion that occurred during the reign of Ptolemy V. It is no exaggeration to say that the outcome of that rebellion shaped Western Civilization. At Tell Timai in the Nile Delta, the first evidence of the destruction that followed in the wake of unrest has been found. Burned houses, unburied bodies, and weapons tell a tale of the fierce struggle between Egyptians and their Greek overlords.

Dr Jay Silverstein has worked at Tell Timai, the ancient city of Thmouis, since 2007. He recently joined the faculty at Nottingham Trent University and prior to that, he was at the School for Advanced Studies in Russia. Jay brings a unique background to his archaeological work which has included work globally in remote places such as North Korea and Papua New Guinea. He also has extensive experience conducting research in Mexico and Guatemala. Recent publications have highlighted the perfume industry at Thmouis, the relationship between hydrograph and the construction of a nilometer, and the evidence of violent destruction associated with the Egyptian revolt during the reign of Ptolemy V. Discoveries from this last December and January include a cache of fertility cult figurines and a Roman bath.

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This meeting will be on Zoom and in person in Glasgow.

Nearly 5 years ago, in early 2018, Monument Men were invited by Manchester Museum to assess a large collection of archaeological plaster casts in the Egypt and Sudan stores with a view to a photogrammetry project. Following conservation work, they were scanned and researched over a couple of weeks by a team of volunteers, with a surprising result – some of these casts were identified as the Ptolemaic sanctuary chapel of Imhotep and Amenhotep, Son of Hapu at the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, originally commissioned for reproduction from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

While the collection is still in a very fragile state, they do provide fascinating insights into the site during the period they were taken, with some of the casts offering the potential for further scientific analysis of possible transferred pigments from the original wall decoration. This presentation will discuss the evolution of the project, what has been achieved already, and our future plans for the collection.

Lee Robert McStein is the technical director of Monument Men, a non-profit cultural heritage organisation based in the North West of England, an academy trainer for the Italian photogrammetry developers 3DFlow (University of Verona) and consultant photogrammetrist to the Ancient Egyptian Animal Bio Bank (University of Manchester).

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This lecture will be preceded by the Society AGM.

The Teaching of Ptahhotep was first published as ‘the world’s oldest book’ in Paris in 1858. As such it might have caused a sensation. Instead, The Teaching gained a reputation as gobbledegook—too obscure to understand, too difficult to translate. Before the end of the century a milestone in human history had effectively disappeared from public view, and its true character as a book about language, spirituality and the human condition has rarely been recognised. Here Bill considers how The Teaching came to be so neglected because of our own prejudices about who Ptahhotep was, what he was talking about, and even the very language of his book.

Dr Bill Manley is best known for devising popular access to the study of Ancient Egypt. He lectured at the Universities of Glasgow, London and Liverpool for more than thirty years, and was Senior Curator for Ancient Egypt at National Museums Scotland. He still works with archaeological projects in Egypt, including the survey of a pristine site near the Valley of the Kings. His previous books have been translated into dozens of languages, and he has spoken at several international book festivals. Bill is Honorary President of Egyptology Scotland, Co-Director of Egiptología Complutense, and contributes to the Coptic Magical Papyri Project. His latest book, The Oldest Book in the World. Philosophy in the Age of the Pyramids, will be published by Thames & Hudson in June 2023.

This meeting will be on Zoom and in person in Glasgow, but please note that it will not be recorded.

Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members

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Ian Mathieson Memorial Lecture

Online Event

This talk will introduce a scribe/painter who lived in the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina, whose inhabitants created the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. By studying the individual hieroglyphs in the superbly decorated underground chambers of the Chief Workman Anhurkhawy (TT 359), it is possible to see how variable the shapes of Nebnefer’s signs could be according to where in the tomb he was painting and what texts he was writing; how some of his hieroglyphs show unusual creativity; what spelling mistakes he could make and how he corrected them; and how his hieroglyphs show that he possessed a knowledge of the hieratic as well as the hieroglyphic script. Interestingly he may also have manipulated the format of the texts for his own purposes as a means of self-presentation within this funerary monument of the Chief Workman.

So by studying in detail his handwriting style, it is possible to contemplate behaviour patterns and conscious thought-processes made by a painter of hieroglyphs who lived in pharaonic Egypt over 3000 years ago.

Dr Elizabeth Bettles followed a degree in Egyptology and Coptic at Liverpool University. In 1989 she joined theOxford Expedition to Egypt team as their epigrapher drawing facsimiles of reliefs in Old Kingdommastabas at Saqqara in the tomb of the vizier Kagemni. Since that year she has hardly missed aseason working archaeologically in Egypt. In 1994, while doing an MA at University College London, she joined Ian Mathieson’s team as site supervisor for his ground-penetrating survey work at Saqqara, which continued for several seasons around the Gisr el-Mudir and remains of Late Period temples. She has been a member of the British Museum team in the Dongola region of the Sudan working as a surveyor. She has studied ceramics for several teams, working with the EES team at Saqqara, the German Institute at Buto, and Berkeley University at Tell Muqdam in the Delta and Tell el-Hiba in Middle Egypt. After her PhD at UCL, she returned to her epigraphic work recording wall-paintings in a Roman-period mammisi in the Dakhleh oasis, with a Dutch team from Leiden University. From 2018 she has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Leiden University with a project which characterises and identifies different hieroglyphic handwriting styles in texts painted in the royal workmen’s tombs at Deir el-Medina at Luxor.

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Scott Allan is a PhD Candidate at Macquarie University.

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This event is also being streamed on Zoom. Tickets for virtual and in-person attendance must be booked in advance.

For membership, or to buy a ticket via bank transfer, contact: treasureregyptscot@gmail.com

General enquiries: chairegyptscot@gmail.com

Online Lecture

In 1872, just two years after it was founded, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, received as its first major gift of art some 4500 Egyptian antiquities collected in Egypt in the 1820s and 1830s by Robert Hay, which had been purchased in London from Hay’s heirs by Samuel Alds Way, a wealthy Boston merchant. At that time, this was the largest collection of Egyptian art in America. The installation of these antiquities — mostly objects of daily life and funerary art, including seven mummies in their decorated coffins — was so successful with the public that the Trustees of the Museum were induced to pursue collecting Egyptian art directly through excavations in Egypt, so that the collection now numbers close to 70,000 objects. As a result, the Hay Collection--which had provided its initial stimulus— was somewhat overshadowed. Ongoing efforts by the Museum to make its collections more accessible, combined with a thorough rehousing and inventorying project in Egyptian storage, puts us in a better position now than ever before to consider the Hay-Way collection in its entirety. An overview of this collection reveals a number of surprises as well as a precious insight into the earliest days of Egyptology and the reception of Egyptian art in America.

Dr Lawrence M. Berman is Norma Jean Calderwood Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is the author of The Priest, the Prince, and the Pasha: The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Egyptian Sculpture. MFA Publications, 2015; and Unearthing Ancient Nubia: Photographs from the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition. MFA Publications, 2018. His latest book, on ancient Egyptian portraits, will be published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in Fall 2022.

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Please note this is now an online lecture.

In 1922 the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered at Luxor, the first known intact royal burial from ancient Egypt. The excavation by Howard Carter and his team generated enormous media interest and was famously photographed by Harry Burton. These photographs, along with letters, plans, drawings and diaries, are included in an archive created by the excavators and presented to the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. To celebrate the centenary of the discovery, the Griffith Institute, in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries, is hosting the exhibition “Tutankhamun. Excavating the Archive”, that displays a selection of about 150 objects of this archive. They present a vivid and first-hand account of the events and give an intimate insight into the records of one of the world’s most famous archaeological discoveries.

Dr Daniela Rosenow is Project Officer at the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford and Curator of Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive.

Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members

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This event is also being streamed on Zoom. Tickets for virtual and in-person attendance must be booked in advance.

For membership, or to buy a ticket via bank transfer, contact: treasureregyptscot@gmail.com

General enquiries: chairegyptscot@gmail.com

Ramesses II is famous as a self-publicist. However, his kingship and his eventual divinity were both extensively proclaimed and promoted by his fourth son, Prince Khaemwaset. Best known as the 'first Egyptologist', Khaemwaset's activities - and presence on many monuments - offer a fascinating insight into royal and divine concepts in early Ramesside Egypt. This double lecture explores the connections between the pious prince and the divine father.

Campbell Price studied Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, where he is an Honorary Research Fellow. After undertaking fieldwork at Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, Saqqara and the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, in 2011 he became Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester and one of the UK’s largest Egyptology collections. He is currently Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Egypt Exploration Society, and has published widely on Pharaonic material culture.

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Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner (1879-1963) remains, almost sixty years after his death, an important and influential figure in the field of Egyptology. As a man of determination, ambition, and independent means he was ideally positioned to develop and mould the nascent discipline into a major force in world archaeology.

Substantially involved with the Egypt Exploration Fund (later Society) from a very young age, Gardiner engaged with many of the Egyptological greats of the nineteenth century, before going on to act as ‘kingmaker’ for subsequent generations of British Egyptologists. This heavily illustrated lecture examines Gardiner’s crucial involvement in some of the major Egyptological endeavours of the twentieth century, his own researches, and his relationships with key figures in the discipline from Petrie and Margaret Murray to Lord Carnavon and Howard Carter.

Portrait of Sir Alan Gardiner reproduced by kind permission of the Griffith Institute.

John J Johnston is a freelance Egyptologist, Classicist, and cultural historian. He has lectured extensively at major institutions such as the British Museum, the British Film Institute, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. His Egyptological research interests encompass mortuary belief and practice, gender and sexuality, Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, the history of Egyptology, and the reception of ancient Egypt in the modern world.

A former Vice Chair of the Egypt Exploration Society, he is, currently, a Trustee of By Jove Theatre Company and Ambassador for the International Society for the Study of Egyptomania. His writing is widely published in both academic and general books and periodicals. He has co-edited three volumes and served on the Editorial Board of ‘Egyptian Archaeology.’ He has made numerous onscreen contributions to television and Blu-Ray documentaries in the fields of both Egyptology and British cinema, respectively.

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How the ancient Egyptians depicted the world around them and their afterlives, in map form, and the sources we can consider as 'maps'

Peter Robinson is an independent scholar and freelance lecturer. He is a Trustee of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities (SSEA) and long-time contributor (maps and articles) to Ancient Egypt Magazine. He has a continuing interest in the religion and afterlives of the Ancient Egyptians, and has presented and published papers on the geographical and sacred landscapes within a number of Egyptian afterlife texts.

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A talk on the Inaros (Pedubastis) Cycle, a set of late tales based on historical figures

Professor Kim Ryholt studied at the University of Copenhagen, Freie Universität in Berlin, and Julius-Maximilians Universität in Würzburg, and has been employed by the University of Copenhagen since 1994. He is responsible for the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection and the associated international research project since 1999, and much of his research, mainly funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, is related to the invaluable collection of ancient manuscripts in the collection, in particular the remains of the only extant temple library from ancient Egypt. The library pertains to the temple of Soknebtunis at the site at Tebtunis where he participates in the ongoing Franco-Italian excavations, and he is also responsible for the international publication programme relating to the numerous demotic papyri.

This event has been cancelled.

A fresh look at some of the misconceptions of Ancient Egyptian history. This afternoon we will be looking at the ways in which the writing of histories and chronologies of early literate societies such as Egypt differs from that of more recent times, in particular the provisional nature of so much what passes for ancient Egyptian history. We will also explore how the latter is often misunderstood by non-specialists, and the way that this has combined with the over-active imaginations of scholars to produce historical ‘zombies’ that are still popularly held as ‘facts’ long after their original bases have vanished in light of new discoveries and scholarly reassessments.

Professor Aidan Dodson has taught at the University of Bristol since 1996, becoming honorary Professor of Egyptology in 2018. A graduate of the University of Liverpool, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1995, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2003, served as Chair of Trustees of the Egypt Exploration Society from 2011 to 2016, and was Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo for the Spring of 2013. Aidan is the author of over 25 books and over 400 articles and reviews.

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The last native Egyptian temple, that of of Isis in Philae, was officially closed ca. 536 CE, probably a hundred years after the cult itself had ceased, and the Egyptian population had become almost entirely Christian. Nonetheless, a small dossier of magical texts, written in Coptic and dated to between the fifth and ninth centuries, continue to use the Egyptian gods as characters in brief narrative spells, known as "charms", which aim to heal diseases or cause people to fall in love. This talk will present these sources within their larger social context, looking at the evidence for continuity with practices dating back to the Middle Kingdom, as well as their adaptation into a new, Christian, environment.

Dr Korshi Dosoo is the junior research group leader of the project The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. Formerly ATER (lecturer) at the University of Strasbourg and post-doctoral researcher on the Labex RESMED project Les mots de la paix. His PhD thesis, 'Rituals of Apparition on the Theban Magical Library' was completed in 2015 at Macquarie University, Australia. His research focuses on magic and lived religion in Egypt from the Ptolemaic to Mamluk periods as revealed by papyrological and epigraphic sources.

https://www.coptic-magic.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/

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This lecture will be preceded by the Society AGM

For at least one hundred and fifty years, European illustrations of two of the most iconic forms of Ancient Egyptian architecture, pyramids and obelisks, seemed to get them wrong. Pyramids were shown as far more steeply pitched than real ones, and obelisks as more like very tall narrow pyramids, creating strange hybrids which were neither one nor the other, pyramisks or obelids. Why was this? Was it because the people drawing them had never been to Egypt? Were these just fanciful representations of exotic, almost mythical structures? Or is there another explanation? Join Dr Chris Elliott as he explores this strange phenomenon, taking in Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, English Country Gardens, mausoleums, pilgrims, travellers, and more.

Dr Chris Elliott is a member of the Society of Authors and has been a member of the Egypt Exploration Society since 1993. He was a contributor to Imhotep Today, a volume on Egyptianising architecture in the series 'Encounters with Egypt' (published by UCL Press, 2003). He has written on the influence of Ancient Egypt in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, KMT, Minerva, and more. He is the author of Egypt in England (published by Historic England, 2012) and obtained his PhD from the University of Southampton in 2019.

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Until recently the Scribe of the Necropolis (now more accurately: Scribe of the Tomb) Dhutmose was mainly known from a handful of documents from his partly preserved correspondence and the so-called house of his son, Butehamun, at Medinet Habu. Little was known about his activities as administrator of the institution responsible for the creation of the royal tombs in the Valley of Kings.

Recent chance discoveries of papyri in the museums of Vienna and Turin have provided us with a wealth of new data about his work and his private life. As a result of the study of his handwriting, more documents could be ascribed to him. All in all, we now get a picture of the remarkable career of a very busy man living in a tense time and under tricky circumstances.

Dr Robert J. Demaree studied Egyptology at the Universities of Leiden, Copenhagen, Oxford and Amsterdam. He was assistant curator at the Museum of Antiquities, Leiden from 1958-1962, and afterwards worked as a publisher for many years. He has been a lecturer at Leiden University since 1984, specializing in the hieratic script and in the socio-economic history of the New Kingdom, notably of the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina. He is currently working on the publication of hieratic papyri in Turin, ostraca in London, Cairo, Brussels and several other collections, and graffiti from several sites in Egypt, such as Thebes, Saqqara, Edfu, Hierakonpolis and Deir Abu Hinnes.

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Digging in Thebes in 1908, William Matthew Flinders Petrie discovered a spectacular burial of a woman in a gilded coffin bedecked in a massive amount of gold jewelry. The grave group, possibly the richest ever to leave Egypt was awarded to the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. While the coffin was quite well preserved, the inscription on it naming the owner was damaged leaving her identity a mystery. It has been suggested that it may have named her as ‘King's Great Wife’. This talk will examine the burial and particularly the surprising amount of Nubian material included in the burial and how it might indicate who she may have been.

Peter Lacovara (B.A. 1976, Boston University; Ph.D. 1993 The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago) is Director of The Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund. He was Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum from 1998 to 2014. Previously he has served as Assistant Curator in the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Currently he is also Consulting Curator for the Egyptian Collection at the Albany Institute of History and Art and Visiting Research Scholar at the American University in Cairo.

He has also taught at Syracuse University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Georgia State University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and been the W. K. Simpson Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo.

His archaeological fieldwork has included excavations at the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, the Palace city of Amenhotep III at Malqata in Western Thebes, Abydos, Hierakonpolis and at the Giza Plateau, and currently he is directing the survey and restoration of the site of Deir el-Ballas. His publications include studies on Daily Life and Urbanism in Ancient Egypt, Egyptian Mortuary Traditions, and the Material Culture of Ancient Egypt and Nubia.

https://peterlacovara.com/

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