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March 2016

“Living in a Liminal Zone: The ‘Town’ of Queen Khentkawes at Giza” Ana Tavares (EEG Meeting Talk)

On Sunday Ana Tavares co-Field Director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) came to talk to us at the Essex Egyptology Group about her work on two 4th Dynasty towns on the Giza Plateau near the Pyramids which she’s currently writing up as her PhD thesis. Her talk focussed on the town near Queen Khentkawes’s monument, with some comparisons to the other town at Heit el Ghurab (also called the Lost City of the Pyramids, which is where the builders of the Pyramids lived). Below you can see a plan of the Giza Plateau (that I found on wikipedia last year when I was writing about my visit there in November 2014). Heit el Ghurab isn’t marked – but it lies southeast of Khafre & Menkaure’s pyramid complexes (so the bottom right hand corner). The tomb of Queen Khentkawes is labelled towards the bottom right, and the pink L shape… Read More »“Living in a Liminal Zone: The ‘Town’ of Queen Khentkawes at Giza” Ana Tavares (EEG Meeting Talk)

In Our Time: Akhenaten

Back in the summer while In Our Time wasn’t airing new episodes we dug back through the archives and found a (rare) Egyptian related one that we didn’t think we’d listened to before – about Akhenaten, which aired in 2009. The experts on the programme were Richard Parkinson (British Museum), Elizabeth Frood (University of Oxford) and Kate Spence (University of Cambridge). (As it’s so old affiliations of the experts have probably changed.) They started with a little bit of scene setting and overview of Akhenaten’s reign, placing him in context. He was one of the Pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty in the New Kingdom period. This was a particularly prosperous time in Egypt’s history, Akhenaten’s father Amenhotep III in particular can be considered as ruling over a Golden Age. When Akhenaten came to the throne he seemed much like a conventional Pharaoh. He initially used the more traditional name Amenhotep… Read More »In Our Time: Akhenaten