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August 2014

Discovering Tutankhamun (Exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum)

In the middle of August we went to the Discovering Tutankhamun exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum. When we were there we met up with other people from the Essex Eygptology Group who’d come across for the day (we were staying with my parents for the weekend so were already in Oxford). A lot of the items in the exhibition came from the Griffith Institute, who have all the papers and so on relating to Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The first third of the exhibition was about the discovery itself. It started with a bit of biographical information about Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon before moving on to the discovery and the start of the excavation. This section included some of the original index cards for the objects, and the photographs taken by Harry Burton. As the photos are all in black and white they annotated the… Read More »Discovering Tutankhamun (Exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum)

August EEG Meeting

The August meeting of the Essex Egyptology Group is a little different from the other meetings – it’s the AGM, and so instead of an invited speaker we have 10 minute talks given by members and a book auction for charity. This year we had five speakers. After a few technical hitches I was the first speaker and talked about the tomb of Kha and Merit, as we’d seen the items from there in the Turin Egyptian Museum last October. J videoed my talk, and it’s up online here. I was followed by Blake Sellors who talked to us about Hatshepsut and her temple at Deir el Bahri, focussing on how she used the reliefs in the temple to legitimise her rule. Tilly Burton then spoke to us about the image of the Pharaoh trampling his enemies as a bull (or other creature), showing us how the same imagery is… Read More »August EEG Meeting

“The Coffins of the Senior Lector Priest Sesenebenef: A Middle Kingdom Book of the Dead?” Harco Willems

Each year the British Museum host a two day colloquium about an egyptological topic, and a lecture in the evening of one of the days which is the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Egyptology. J went to the whole colloquium this year (about coffins) and I just came along and joined him for the lecture. This was given by Harco Willems, and concerned the texts on a particular coffin from the Middle Kingdom. Willems started by giving us a bit of context for this particular coffin. It was discovered in the 1890s at al Lisht. This site includes the mastaba of Imhotep and Senwosret I’s pyramid, and was initially excavated between 1894 & 1896 by a French team. It has been re-excavated in the 20th Century (I think he said the 1980s), but the tomb of Sesenebenef wasn’t part of this later excavation. The tomb contained the coffins,… Read More »“The Coffins of the Senior Lector Priest Sesenebenef: A Middle Kingdom Book of the Dead?” Harco Willems