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Oakes, Lorna

“Flinders Petrie – from Stonehenge to Jerusalem” Lorna Oakes

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In the middle of January we began the 2023 programme of talks at the Essex Egyptology Group with a Zoom lecture given by Lorna Oakes. Her subject for the talk was William Matthew Flinders Petrie – she began by noting that she wasn’t going to be able to cover all aspects of his career in a single talk, so she was going to concentrate on some of the main archaeological sites that he investigated. Flinders Petrie was the pioneer of modern archaeological methods in Egypt, and this was a great contrast to the work of his contemporaries. His main interest was to halt the destruction of the remains of Egyptian monuments, he’d been horrified by what he saw while he was working at Giza – at the same time Mariette was working at the Valley Temple of Khafre and Oakes quoted us something that Petrie later wrote about that excavation.… Read More »“Flinders Petrie – from Stonehenge to Jerusalem” Lorna Oakes

“Ancient Egyptian Thought in the Old Testament” Lorna Oakes (EEG Meeting Talk)

At the beginning of August Lorna Oakes came to the Essex Egyptology Group to talk to us about the parallels between Ancient Egyptian literary sources and the Old Testament. In her lecture she covered several sorts of literature including myths, legends, hymns & prayers and prophecy. Oakes started with myths, and began at the beginning with creation stories. She pointed out that these aren’t “just stories”, for the Ancient Egyptians (and the writers of the Old Testament) these were serious reflections on their origins. The Egyptians had several creation stories – even as early as the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom there were at least two variants with the god Atum bringing the gods Shu & Tefnut into being by sneezing or by using his semen. The closest variant to the Old Testament creation story is called the Memphite Theology and the text is known from a large granite… Read More »“Ancient Egyptian Thought in the Old Testament” Lorna Oakes (EEG Meeting Talk)