Hybrid lecture - In person and via Zoom.                               Book your ticket now!

Speaker: Donald P Ryan (Pacific Lutheran University)

Title: The Valley of the Kings: research and discoveries in several of the lesser-known tombs.

Abstract:  The goal of the Pacific Lutheran University Valley of the Kings Project has been to investigate several of the undecorated and typically smaller tombs found amongst the larger tombs in Egypt's New Kingdom royal cemetery.

Over the years, the project has excavated 11 such tombs including KV 60 (with its purported mummy of Hatshepsut), KV 21 (two 18th dynasty royal women), KV 48 (the vizier of Amenhotep II), and three small tombs KV 50, 51, 52) which contained the mummies of animals. The project's director, Donald P. Ryan, will provide a look at some of the expedition’s interesting discoveries.

Bio: Dr. Donald P. Ryan is an archaeologist affiliated with the Division of Humanities at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, USA, a Fellow of both the Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society, and a Research Associate of the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway. A veteran of many field expeditions, he is also the author of numerous scientific and popular articles and several books on archaeological subjects.

Hybrid lecture - In person and via Zoom

Speaker: Ersin Hussein (Swansea University)
Title: Metal production and consumption: luxury, power, and identity in Ptolemaic Cyprus.

Abstract:  The Roman annexation of Cyprus from Egypt in 58 BC is an episode that epitomises the spirit of political competition and personal ambitions for status in the Roman Republic. Wide reporting on the key personalities provides insight into the socio-political dynamics between the Ptolemies (based in Egypt and Cyprus) and Rome as well as the wealth, status and identity of the island. Particularly telling are hints at the incredible wealth extracted from the island and transferred to Rome to boost its treasury. The immediate auction of property confiscated from the Ptolemies (58–56 BC), and the subsequent lease of the island's copper mines to Herod the Great (30 BC) suggest aspects of the island's organisation and imply that the Romans inherited a bountiful and prosperous landscape. Whimsical and impressionistic accounts of the island's key resources (copper and timber - synonymous with metal extraction, production, and trade) embedded in later literary works about the island's Ptolemaic and Roman periods are also testament to this.

Taking the dramatic accounts of the annexation and its fallout as a point of departure, this paper will discuss perceptions of wealth, power, and island identity under Ptolemaic rule (295/4–58 BC). Focus will be on the extraction, production, and consumption of metals across the island to work towards an understanding of the socio-economic character of Ptolemaic Cyprus. Close engagement with the island's landscape, environment, and material culture is essential to critique the later impressionistic and derivative accounts of the island under the Ptolemies. More than this, taking a landscape and object centred approach presents opportunities to explore the lived experiences of the islanders and those who came into contact with them, something that the literary sources are often lacking.

Bio: Dr. Ersin Hussein is an ancient historian whose research primarily focuses on the history and material culture of Cyprus. Her first monograph, Revaluing Roman Cyprus: Local Identity on an Island in Antiquity, was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. This work champions Cyprus as a rich and rewarding Roman province to study on account of its dynamic culture and society under Roman rule and its participation in the wider Empire, but particularly because of the ways its cities, and their inhabitants, maintained, and articulated, their deep-rooted cultural ties with multiple landscapes across the Mediterranean. Ersin continues to explore interpretations of Cyprus as a real and imagined landscape. The history of Cypriot artefacts, and their display, in museums and responses to Cyprus in visual art are crucial aspects of her research on receptions of the island’s history. She is also researches the cultural value of metals in antiquity, notably copper – a metal synonymous with Cypriot identity, as well as the legacies of industrial mining sites as heritage landscapes. Ersin is currently working on her second monograph which investigates the production and consumption of metals in Ptolemaic and Roman Cyprus.

Hybrid lecture - In person and via Zoom

Speaker: Loretta Kilroe (The British Museum)
Title: Site H25: living under colonial occupation in New Kingdom Nubia

Abstract: H25 is a rural agricultural site occupied from at least the end of the Kerma period, through the Egyptian occupation of Nubia in the New Kingdom. The site is contemporary with temple towns such as Amara West and Sai, both of which show high levels of Egyptian material culture. H25 in contrast is striking due to its high quantities of indigenous material as well as preponderance of Egyptian storage vessels, suggesting that its inhabitants had access to Egyptian material but chose to partially retain their own practices.

This lecture will present H25 and explore how we can use the material found here to understand activities at the site, which seems to have acted as a local distribution nexus for the now defunct Alfreda Nile tributary. This in turn broadens our understanding of the colonial period in Nubia, with evidence now suggesting the ongoing agency of local peoples and sites working independently of Egyptian centres. The excavation of rural settlement sites such as H25 is essential for putting Egyptian textual evidence about the absorption of Nubia into a local context and provides important parallel information to the urban temple towns so focused upon by earlier fieldwork.

Bio: Loretta Kilroe completed her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2019 and now works as the Project Curator for Sudan and Nubia at the British Museum. She specialises in ceramics and has excavated at numerous sites in Sudan including Amara West, H25 and Kurgus. She is currently the Honorary Secretary for the Sudan Archaeological Research Society.

Online lecture - via Zoom only

Speaker: Heidi Köpp-Junk (Assistant Professor in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, section for Egyptian temples, Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw / Georg-August University of Göttingen)
Title: Dewatering systems for wastewater and rain in ancient Egypt: the latest research on the water systems in the temple of Athribis and Tuna el-Gebel

Abstract: While irrigation is very often discussed in Egyptology, dewatering systems are not. Therefore, the lecture focuses on dewatering systems for rainwater and used water in Pharaonic Egypt. This practice has so far been attributed to the Romans, but the oldest installation in Egypt dates to 3100 BC. Already in the time of the pyramids, techniques were attested that are still in use today, showing that ancient Egyptian builder and engineers were very inventive and creative. The drainage of used water is documented for example in the palaces of Medinet Habu and in Amarna, the city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Moreover, the lecture presents in detail Heidi Köpp-Junks latest excavation results from the temple of Athribis and the necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel.

Bio: Dr. Heidi Köpp-Junk is an Egyptologist, Music Archaeologist, and classically trained singer. She studied Egyptology, Prehistory, and Ethnology at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen and got her Ph.D. with the thesis Travel in Pharaonic Egypt (supervisors: Prof. Dr. F. Junge; Prof. Dr. G. Dreyer). Since then, she worked at the universities of Göttingen, Münster, Trier, and Tübingen, and for different museums and exhibitions (British Museum, Roemer and Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Federal State Museum for Prehistory Halle/Saale, World Cultural Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte, Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, Georg-August University Göttingen (The songs of the Ptolemies)). Since 1988 she has been excavating in Germany (Glauberg, Northeim, Einbeck) and since 1990 in Egypt (Dahshur, Elephantine, Buto, Sakkara, Qantir, Abydos, Athribis) for several institutions like the German Archaeological Institute Kairo (DAI). Currently she is working as an Assistant Professor in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, section Egyptian Temples, Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw.

Her research interests lie in travel, mobility, carrying chairs, wagons, carts, and chariots as well as dewatering systems and music archaeology. As a trained singer she performs songs from ancient Egypt, composed by her from texts like pHarris 500 and pChester Beatty while playing a replica of a lute from the time of Tutankhamun and other instruments (sistrum, lyre, frame drum etc.). She has recently published the following two monographs.

• Musik im Alten Ägypten. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2023
• Nofretete auf dem Streitwagen - Ikonographische und textliche Belege für Frauen auf Streitwagen in Ägypten. Rimbaud Verlag, Aachen 2023

Online lecture - via Zoom only

Speaker: Kristin Thompson (The Amarna Project)
Title: Unknown royal statuary from Amarna

Abstract: Amarna art has held a fascination for Egyptologists and enthusiasts to a considerable extent through its statuary. The quartzite princess heads from the Thutmose Workshop, now in Berlin and Cairo, and the beautiful white limestone fragments from the Great Aten Temple, most of them now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are among the most famous pieces. The painted limestone head of Nefertiti is universally recognized and admired. Yet these pieces came into museums over a century ago. Less impressive pieces have sat unpublished in museum storerooms. Moreover, many hundreds of fragments were discarded in dumps by early teams excavating at Amarna. The current excavations under Barry Kemp’s leadership have recovered thousands of pieces of stone from these dumps, many of them pieces of statues. This talk will explain how all this happened and show a sampling of unknown pieces.

Bio: Since 2001, Kristin Thompson has been a member of Barry Kemp’s expedition at Amarna. Initially she registered hundreds of fragments from previous excavation teams’ dumps. Her work quickly expanded to include joining some of these fragments, including reassembling substantial sections of a major statue from the Thutmose Workshop. Kristin also traced many of these items to the workshop or building where they originated. As hundreds of additional pieces continued to be found by the current excavation, it became obvious that a publication of all known pieces from royal buildings at the site was essential. Along with Marsha Hill, Curator Emerita from the Metropolitan Museum, she has co-authored Statuary from Royal Buildings at Amarna: Its Creation and Contexts, forthcoming from the Egypt Exploration Society.

Hybrid lecture - In person and via Zoom

Speaker: Phil Parkes & MSc Conservation Practice Students, (Cardiff University)
Title: Conservation of Artefacts from the Egypt Centre.

Abstract: The Egypt Centre has a long-standing relationship with the conservation courses at Cardiff University, with students working on objects from the Centre, gaining experience of conservation and helping preserve the collection. The talk will highlight the recent conservation work carried out on Egypt Centre objects.

Online lecture - via Zoom only

Speaker: Victoria Jensen (Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies University of California, Berkeley)

Title: Deir el-Ballas: The royal residence that defeated the Hyksos.

Abstract: Located 40 km north of Thebes, Deir el-Ballas was founded in the late 17th Dynasty by the Theban rulers as a forward campaign settlement for their forays against the Hyksos, the Canaanite rulers who controlled northern Egypt c. 1650–1550 BCE. The site consists of a palace, workshops, the homes of supporting staff including villas for court officials and a compact village for workers, as well as an enormous two-level platform built on a high hill that likely served as a lookout point. Three cemeteries are also located at Deir el-Ballas. This lecture will introduce the Theban royal family who ruled Upper Egypt at this pivotal time, the history of excavation at the site, and the evidence of daily activities, royal rituals, and funerary practices that can be gleaned from the archaeological record.

Bio: Dr. Victoria Jensen received a B.A. and M.A from the University of Chicago in Political Science/International Relations, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology from the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation topic was “The Cemeteries of Deir el-Ballas: Non-elite burials of the 17th–19th Dynasties and their relationship to the royal palace.” Her monograph based on this work is currently in preparation to be published in the Harvard Egyptological Studies series. Dr. Jensen has field experience at Abydos, el-Hibeh, and Deir el-Ballas in Egypt and has conducted museum and archival research at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Dr. Jensen is a Past President of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Northern California chapter. She has presented her research at the International Congress of Egyptologists and the ARCE National Meetings. Her research interests include the materiality of religious practices in ancient Egypt and ethnoarchaeology.

Speaker: Martin Odler
Title: Details to be confirmed.

Online lecture - via Zoom only

Speaker: Marisol Solchaga (University of Manchester)
Title: ‘Offering-trays’ and ‘soul-houses’: reconsidering their function as ritual artefacts.

Abstract: ‘Offering-trays’ and ‘soul-houses’ are pottery artefacts dated to the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. They both have a rectangular or rounded shape with devices intended to receive or conduct liquids. They usually contain pottery models on their surface and the reason why they have been regarded as different objects is based on these models: the so called ‘soul-houses’ have models of buildings, whereas on the ‘offering-trays’ these are absent. This presentation will analyse the different type of models represented on these objects and will shed light on their function in Middle Kingdom funerary rituals. The archaeological context will be also examined to determine their use and chronology. They are mainly found in cemeteries, but they also appear in settlements. This presentation will reflect on the function of these objects as part of the material agency of the encounter between the living and the dead.

Bio: Dr. Marisol Solchaga obtained an MA in Museum Studies at the University of Manchester with a specialization of Egyptian collections. She submitted her PhD in 2021 on the study of the soul-houses and offering-trays and associated material. She works at the University of Manchester in Collection Management and since 2017 has been a member of the archaeological mission in Dra Abu el-Naga, Luxor led by Jose Manuel Galan (Djehuty Project).

Online lecture - via Zoom only

Speaker: Paulína Šútorová
Title: Lost Women: Rediscovering Ramesside Queens

Abstract: Egyptian queens have fascinated modern people for years. However, it was not until the later 20th century, with the rise of feminism, that more Egyptologists started properly paying attention to them. Their research has, however, focused mainly on the well-known queens, who possessed exceptional political status and competencies such as Hatshepsut (c. 1479–1458 BCE), Nefertiti (c. 1351–1334 BCE), and Cleopatra VII (c. 51–30 BCE). In contrast, the Ramesside queens of the 19th and 20th Dynasties (c. 1550–1077 BCE) have not received the same academic attention or passionate media coverage. Let us examine some of the Ramesside queens together, what roles their played, and what myths about them prevail until today.

Bio: Paulína Šútorová completed her BA and MA in Egyptology at Swansea University and was a volunteer at the Egypt Centre. In the framework of her studies, scientific activity and her several articles published in various science-popularization magazines, she deals primarily with hieroglyphic texts, Egyptian epigraphy, literature, and the history and art of the New Kingdom. Her specialisation within Egyptology is the New Kingdom queens, which she also deals with in her PhD thesis at the University of Trier in Germany. During her studies, she also participated in excavations at Tell el-Rétaba and reconstructed the texts from the tomb of Karakhamun as part of the South Asasif Conservation Project.