“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)