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“Religion in the Ancient World” Glanville Study Day & Lecture 2018

This year’s Glanville Lecture in Cambridge was given by Jan Assmann who is an expert on the religion of Ancient Egypt, and to go along with the lecture there was a study day which had 6 speakers (including Assmann) who each told us about a different topic to do with religion in the ancient world. (Well, the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern portion thereof.) Glanville Study Day: “Religion in the Ancient World” “Egyptian Concepts of Cosmogony and the Origins of Philosophy” Jan Assmann The day started off with Jan Assmann’s first talk, about the theology of Ancient Egyptian ideas about the creation of the world/universe. His key point was that the Ancient Egyptians believed the world evolves from a transformation of god rather than being created by god. It is not chaos then cosmos, instead there is pre-existence which has continuity with existence. The canonical cosmogony (theory of the origin of the universe)… Read More »“Religion in the Ancient World” Glanville Study Day & Lecture 2018

“Saite Tombs at Saqqara” Ramadan Hussein (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of February Ramadan Hussein came to talk to us at the Essex Egyptology Group about the work he is doing at Saqqara. He works for Tübingen University, and is leading a joint German/Egyptian team who are investigating some of the Saite Period (26th Dynasty) tombs at Saqqara. Although best known for the Old Kingdom monuments, Saqqara also has the most Saite Period tombs known anywhere – there are several clustered around the 5th Dynasty Pyramid of Unas, plus another 2 near the opposite corner of the Step Pyramid complex, two more near the 6th Dynasty Pyramid of Teti and yet another at the end of the causeway of Unas. There are also several un-mapped & undocumented tombs to the east of the Step Pyramid complex. Hussein is working on three of the tombs that are near the Pyramid of Unas, which were initially discovered 117 years ago.… Read More »“Saite Tombs at Saqqara” Ramadan Hussein (EEG Meeting Talk)

“Illuminating the Path of Darkness: Artificial Light in Ancient Egyptian Ritual” Meghan Strong (EEG Meeting Talk)

In December Meghan Strong, a PhD student (about to submit her thesis!) at Cambridge, came to talk to us at the Essex Egyptology Group about the use of artificial light in Ancient Egyptian ritual. Light in ritual is something we’re still familiar with in the modern world – think of Divali, Advent (or the Easter Vigil service), Hannukah and many other examples. Strong’s argument is that the Ancient Egyptians were no different from modern people in this respect. She began by giving us context for both artificial light in pre-history & in the ancient world, and for the study of light in an archaeological context. Fire is the basis of ancient artificial light. The first evidence of its use as a tool is around 1 million years ago, and Strong said that it can be argued that this is part of what makes us human (as distinct from animals). The… Read More »“Illuminating the Path of Darkness: Artificial Light in Ancient Egyptian Ritual” Meghan Strong (EEG Meeting Talk)

EEG Trip Behind the Scenes at the British Museum (Plus a Visit to the Sir John Soane Museum)

In November a group of us from the Essex Egyptology Group had the chance to visit parts of the British Museum that aren’t generally open to the public – some of the storerooms where the 95% of the Egyptian artifacts that aren’t on display are held. I’d been on one of these trips before several years ago, so was pleased at the chance to go again – partly because it’s a chance to see items you don’t normally see, and partly because it would be someone different showing us round so we would see different things. When we’d all arrived we were split into two groups, the one I was in was shown round by Adrienn Almásy. Almásy took us to the Papyrus room first – this is her speciality, she works on Demotic and Coptic texts. There are around 3,300 papyri that belong the museum – some of which… Read More »EEG Trip Behind the Scenes at the British Museum (Plus a Visit to the Sir John Soane Museum)

“Delta Myths and Legends” Penny Wilson (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of November Penny Wilson visited the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about myths & legends of the Delta region of Egypt. Wilson is involved in archaeological work in the Delta, and is currently writing a book about the region as there isn’t one already. One of her areas of interest is whether there is a distinct Delta culture during the Ancient Egyptian period. She began her talk by giving us some geographical context for the region. The first & most obvious difference between the Delta and the Nile Valley is the scale – in most of Egypt there’s only a narrow strip of land that it’s possible to live on, but the Delta is very broad. There is also more variety of environments in the Delta – the marshy interior is different to the desert edges & both are different to the Mediterranean coastline. The… Read More »“Delta Myths and Legends” Penny Wilson (EEG Meeting Talk)

“Ancient Egyptian Justice” Alexandre Loktionov (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of September Alexandre Loktionov visited the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about his work on the Ancient Egyptian justice system. In his introductory remarks he was keen to stress a couple of points – first that he is himself more interested in the Old Kingdom & Middle Kingdom eras, not just the New Kingdom (which receives rather more attention in general). And also that law in Ancient Egypt is not something isolated from the rest of the world, the legal systems of both the Middle East and of sub-Saharan Africa have influences on how the Egyptians practised law. He started his talk by discussing the history of the study of Ancient Egyptian law. It was first studied by Spiegelberg in the 1890s – which is rather late in the history of Egyptology. It’s not just that it took a while for people to consider Egyptian… Read More »“Ancient Egyptian Justice” Alexandre Loktionov (EEG Meeting Talk)

“Asyut: Capital That Never Was” Jochem Kahl (Sackler Lecture 2017)

This year’s Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Egyptology was given by Jochem Kahl on the subject of the city of Asyut. He started by setting the scene with a thematically appropriate quote from Amelia Edwards, who visited the city in 1843. She described how as she approached it looked like a fairytale city on the Nile, but on arrival she was much less impressed with the prosaic reality of the modern city. Asyut was the capital of the 13th Nome in Pharaonic Egypt – it’s in the middle of the country, about 400km south of Cairo, 100km south of Amarna and 300km north of Luxor (these distances are all very approximate!). The modern city has around 400,000 inhabitants, and completely covers old Asyut. Due to the silt deposited by the Nile flooding the depth of any remains is significant – late antiquity is on the order of 5m… Read More »“Asyut: Capital That Never Was” Jochem Kahl (Sackler Lecture 2017)

“The Amarna Stone Village” and “Amarna Blue” Anna Garnett (EEG Meeting Talks)

In July Anna Garnett came to talk to us at the Essex Egyptology Group about pottery from Amarna. Garnett has recently become curator at the Petrie Museum and is also working on analysing the pottery that has been found at the Amarna Stone Village, which is the work she was telling us about during the first part of the meeting. The Amarna Stone Village The Stone Village is a village near the main city of Amarna that has been excavated in modern times between 2005 & 2010. The bulk of the site has been published in 2012 and Garnett is adding to this by analysing the ceramics that have been found (there was a ceramicist with the original excavation but he left before the work was completed and Garnett joined the team in 2015). On the surface the site is formed of stone boulders in marl clay, hence the name,… Read More »“The Amarna Stone Village” and “Amarna Blue” Anna Garnett (EEG Meeting Talks)

“Hatshepsut’s Temple at Deir el Bahri” Sergio Alarcón Robledo (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of June Sergio Alarcón Robledo came to talk to us at the Essex Egyptology Group about the work he’s doing as part of the Polish-Egyptian Mission at Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el Bahri. His talk was in two parts – first the theoretical underpinnings, then the practical work he’s been doing at the site. And after the formal talk was over he also showed us some unpublished imagery he’s been making of various tombs. Robledo started by zooming out to a very wide-angle view of the subject – he showed us a picture of a pre-dynastic burial, of a pyramid, of the temple of Montuhotep II (built at Deir el Bahri before Hatshepsut’s one), of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The unifying theme is that they are all ways of connecting the deceased with the cosmos. At first they just put the body in… Read More »“Hatshepsut’s Temple at Deir el Bahri” Sergio Alarcón Robledo (EEG Meeting Talk)

“Ancient Craft – Modern Science and The Evolution of Mummification” Robert D. Loynes (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the May meeting of the Essex Egyptology Group Robert Loynes talked to us about his work on Ancient Egyptian mummies. He’s a retired orthopaedic surgeon who has subsequently achieved a PhD in Egyptology (from Manchester) using modern medical technology to investigate ancient mummies. Loynes began by telling us about what is known about Ancient Egyptian mummification techniques. Despite the Egyptians love of writing things down the contemporary sources actually don’t tell us anything – what we know is pieced together from later writings and examination of the actual mummies. The first mention of mummification techniques comes from Herodotus around 450 BCE, and it is next discussed by Diodorus Siculus in the 1st Century BCE. The Egyptians believed that for eternal life one needed the following: one’s whole body, one’s name, one’s Ka and one’s Ba. But the reality is that bodies decay and fall apart, so some sort of… Read More »“Ancient Craft – Modern Science and The Evolution of Mummification” Robert D. Loynes (EEG Meeting Talk)