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archaeology

“Seeking Senenmut: Statues, Status and Scandal” Campbell Price (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of June Campbell Price, the curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, came to talk to the Essex Egyptology Group about one of the senior officials in Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s court: Senenmut. Hatshepsut ruled Egypt from 1473-1458 BCE, and she generally seemed to do things differently to her predecessors & successors. Technically she was ruling first as regent for then alongside Tutmosis III – but in reality she was the sole ruler of Egypt, surrounded by a small group of male advisors. Price made the comparison a couple of times in his talk to Elizabeth I (of England) – single woman as the ruler taking a traditionally male role, with a small collection of highly trusted male courtiers none of whom mention their wives terribly often when in the presence of their ruler. In autobiographical texts Senenmut claims to be a rags-to-riches story, but Price pointed out… Read More »“Seeking Senenmut: Statues, Status and Scandal” Campbell Price (EEG Meeting Talk)

“The Mechanisms and Practice of Egyptian Tomb Robbery: A View from Ancient Thebes” Nigel Strudwick (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of April Nigel Strudwick came to the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about tomb robbers. He said that the origins of this particular talk were in trying to understand why most of the Egyptian tombs are in such a chaotic mess when they’re first excavated. He started by showing us pictures of tombs that were discovered intact and tombs that had been robbed before they were discovered. There are actually very few tombs that made it to modern times without having been robbed – the two examples he showed us were the tomb of Kha and Merit in Deir el Medina, and the tomb of Sennenmut’s parents (Ramose and Hatnefer). Kha & Merit’s tomb was fairly neatly organised, with the funerary goods and meal laid out in front of the two large shroud-covered coffins. Ramose & Hatnefer’s tomb was more untidy, and had some extra… Read More »“The Mechanisms and Practice of Egyptian Tomb Robbery: A View from Ancient Thebes” Nigel Strudwick (EEG Meeting Talk)

“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)

“The Sacred Site of ‘Quesna’: Multi-disciplinary Investigations and Analyses in the Cemetery and Falcon Necropolis” Joanne Rowland (EEG Meeting Talk)

On Sunday Joanne Rowland came to talk to us at the Essex Egyptology Group about her work on two sites in the Nile Delta. Her talk was split into two parts – the first was about her work at Quesna (with the title that I’ve used on this blog post) on Old Kingdom and Ptolemaic era structures. After our coffee break she moved on to telling us about work she’s done at the nearby Wadi Gamal looking at much older prehistoric sites. “The Sacred Site of ‘Quesna’: Multi-disciplinary Investigations and Analyses in the Cemetery and Falcon Necropolis” Quesna is situated towards the southern edge of the Nile Delta, between two sites known to have been Nome capitals: Athribis and Busiris. It sits on a sand formation called a Gezira (I think) or turtleback, which sticks out above the silt deposited by the Nile floods. The site was discovered in 1989,… Read More »“The Sacred Site of ‘Quesna’: Multi-disciplinary Investigations and Analyses in the Cemetery and Falcon Necropolis” Joanne Rowland (EEG Meeting Talk)

“Rescuing History: ARCE Recording Sheikh Abd el-Gurneh” Andrew Bednarski (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of September Andrew Bednarski came to the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about an American Research Centre in Egypt (ARCE) project to document the now-demolished village of Qurna. He was involved in the project from 2011-2014, so this is the time period he told us about but the project is still ongoing. This is a bit of a departure from our usual sort of talk – whilst still Egyptian archaeology, most of the subject was considerably more modern. The “village” of Sheikh Abd el-Gurneh (or Qurna) is located in the Valley of the Nobles. This area is best known as the place across the mountains from the Valley of the Kings where the New Kingdom aristocracy built their tombs. There are also older tombs (Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom) in the area, and more recent tombs too. And various waves of habitation including Coptic monasteries.… Read More »“Rescuing History: ARCE Recording Sheikh Abd el-Gurneh” Andrew Bednarski (EEG Meeting Talk)

“An Ancient Flash Flood and Stratigraphy in the Valley of the Kings” Stephen Cross (EEG Meeting Talk)

On Sunday Stephen Cross came to the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about his work in the Valley of the Kings. The research he was telling us about was started to answer one question: why was Tutankhamun’s tomb (KV62) discovered intact? Nearly every other tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings was robbed, so what was different about Tutankhamun’s tomb. He immediately ruled out man-made causes – if the ancient Egyptians had figured out a certain way to prevent robbers getting in then they would’ve done it to all the subsequent tombs too. Of the potential natural causes a flash flood seemed the best candidate and so he investigated the geology of the Valley around KV62. What he found was that when he mapped the routes that flooding took through the Valley three different streams of water collided outside KV62. This creates the right conditions for the… Read More »“An Ancient Flash Flood and Stratigraphy in the Valley of the Kings” Stephen Cross (EEG Meeting Talk)

“Egyptian Fortifications in Canaan” Rupert Chapman (EEG Meeting Talk)

On Sunday Rupert Chapman came to the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about his work on Egyptian fortifications in Canaan. He started by telling us about the different sorts of Egyptian fortification that exist, which have been categorised into four types by an author called Morris. The first two types are never found in the Levant; these are fortresses that control entry points into Egypt proper (for instance at Tell Haboua) and fortress towns such as Kuban in Nubia. The third type are migdol forts – migdol is a Hebrew word that means “tower” and the distinctive feature of these structures is a gate flanked by two towers. An example of this in Egypt is the entrance to Ramesses III’s temple at Medinet Habu. Chapman also compared them to much more modern structures – the early 20th Century AD Tegart Forts built by the British in Palestine (although… Read More »“Egyptian Fortifications in Canaan” Rupert Chapman (EEG Meeting Talk)

Cleopatra: A Timewatch Guide

Cleopatra: A Timewatch Guide was on BBC4 back in February as part of a short run of programmes cobbled together from old Timewatch footage interspersed with some narration by a current presenter (and modern footage of talking heads) tying it all together. The presenter in this case was Vanessa Collinridge, who I’d not seen present anything before (which is a shame for her, as I’m judging her based on this …). The other two that we watched were The Mary Rose: A Timewatch Guide (presented by Dan Snow) and Roman Britain: A Timewatch Guide (presented by Alice Roberts). Sadly, as you might’ve guessed from the preceding paragraph, I wasn’t much impressed with this programme on Cleopatra. The idea, I think, was to look back through the Timewatch archives and tell a story about how our ideas about Cleopatra have changed over the last five or six decades. The other two… Read More »Cleopatra: A Timewatch Guide

“Adornment for the Afterlife: Jewelry and Identity at Ur and Nimrud” Kim Benzell

The second lecture in the 2013 Charles Wilkinson lecture series was associated with the department of Ancient Near East Art at the MMA, and was called “Adornment for the Afterlife: Jewelry and Identity at Ur and Nimrud”. Kim Benzell, who gave the talk, is one of the curators at the museum and is also a trained goldsmith which gave her quite a different perspective on the ornaments she was talking about. There’s a glitch in the video, which meant we didn’t see the introduction to the talk where she sets the scene and explained what she was looking at but I think we managed to figure it out. The bulk of the talk was about the gold ornaments found in two different burials from Mesopotamia. The first was the tomb of Puabi in Ur, who was a queen or priestess buried around 2500BC. The second was the jewellery from the… Read More »“Adornment for the Afterlife: Jewelry and Identity at Ur and Nimrud” Kim Benzell

TV Watched While We Were Away (Almost All Egypt Related)

While we were visiting J’s parents we watched a few documentaries about ancient Egypt (or related subjects) that they’d recorded from TV channels we don’t have. A bit of a mixed bag – one of them I’d’ve switched off if it was just me (J wasn’t as annoyed by it), but the others were better. Ultimate Tut Ultimate Tut was a documentary about Tutankhamun, presented by Chris Naunton (who’s the Director of the EES), so J had heard of it and was looking forward to the chance to watch it. The focus was on how he died, and how come his burial was so small compared to other Pharaohs, although it also covered a lot of what’s known of the history of the period too. It presented a new theory for how Tutankhamun died – perhaps run down by a chariot on the battlefield. The evidence here comes from the… Read More »TV Watched While We Were Away (Almost All Egypt Related)