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November 2018
Israel and the Samaria Highlands: A Nomad Settlement Wave or Urban Expansion during the Early Iron Age?
The Iron I period witnessed a wave of settlements in the highlands of Israel, mostly in Samaria but also to some extent in the Upper Galilee and Judah. This wave is usually associated with the genesis of Ancient Israel and is interpreted in light of the collapse of Canaanite urban centers at the end of the 12th century BCE. This lecture reconsiders the reasons behind this wave of settlement throughout the Samaria Highlands during the Iron I (1200-1000 BCE) in light of new…
Read MoreBetween Egypt and the Near East: Current Research on the Amarna Letters
Various aspects of the interaction between Egypt and other political and cultural centres of the Ancient Near East have always sparked the attention of scholars, trying to understand this multi-layered and complex issue — ranging from the interpretation of finds of Egyptian or Egyptianized objects at the ANE sites to a misapprehension in communication resulting from considerably different concepts of royal power and authority. The Amarna tablets are a collection of almost 400 cuneiform documents discovered in the later 1880’s…
Read MoreGraduate Student Research Presentations and Q&A
12:00 – 1:00pm Overspecializing the Specialist: Reevaluating the Role of Producers in the Study of Technological Interconnectivity Nadia Ben-Marzouk (Archaeology) Accounting for Kingship: The Samaria Ostraca as Royal Performance Jason Price (Hebrew Bible) An Image on the Stele or a Ghost in the Shell? A Cognitive Scientific Approach to the Material “Soul” in the Levant Timothy Hogue (Hebrew Bible) 1:00 – 2:00pm QWS, Edom, and Identities: Exploring the Use of Theophoric Elements in Onomastica as Markers of Identity Andrew Danielson…
Read MoreOctober 2018
The Relationship of Egyptian and Semitic
It has long been known that the ancient Egyptian language is related to the Semitic language family, but the details of this relationship are still not fully understood. In this lecture, we will look at the major similarities (and differences) of the two language groups, including topics in phonology, morphology, and the lexicon, with an eye towards identifying inherited Afroasiatic features. We will also look at how Egyptian and some dialects of Northwest Semitic influenced one another as a…
Read MoreAugust 2018
Reuse of New Kingdom Monuments and Visitors’ Graffiti in Late and Graeco-Roman Period Elkab
Since 2016, the Oxford Expedition to Elkab has extended its work of epigraphic recording and publication to the Late and Graeco-Roman Period monuments and inscriptions in the necropolis and the adjacent Wadi Hillal. Recording of the inscribed material, which mainly consists of unpublished graffiti and secondary inscriptions, is proceeding hand-in-hand with the re-documentation of the entirety of the monuments and architectural structures that host them (New Kingdom and later tomb chapels, the Ramesside/Ptolemaic hemispeos, and the temple of Amenhotep III),…
Read MoreMay 2018
A Romano-Egyptian Obelisk Beyond the Nile
Using a Romano-Egyptian obelisk from the collection of the Museo del Sannio in Benevento, Italy as a case study, this talk will overview the major themes of the current Getty exhibition “Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World.” This exhibition explores cross-cultural interactions between Egypt, Greece, and Rome from about 2000 BC until about AD 300. Part of a new Getty initiative called The Classical World in Context, the exhibition kicks off a series that will highlight the Classical…
Read MoreApril 2018
In the Workshop of an Ancient Egyptian Sculptor
In 1912, the excavation team of the Deutsch Orient-Gesellschaft under the direction of Ludwig Borchardt revealed the exceptional remains of the estate and workshop of an ancient Egyptian sculptor of the middle of the 15th century BCE, who worked for Pharaoh Akhenaten in the latter’s new royal residence of Akhet-Aten (modern Amarna), in Middle Egypt. Next to the world-famous bust of Nefertiti, the German excavators unearthed a collection of plaster portrait studies that allow reconstructing the creation procedure of ancient…
Read MoreARCE Practice Talks Round 2
The Compositional Design of Djedhor Cairo JE 46341 Michael Chen (Egyptology). This paper examines the layout of spells upon the statue surfaces of Djedhor to uncover the inherent planning behind the design of the statue. This strategic design reveals both a balanced spell arrangement and the inscribing order of the statue’s construction. The patterns observed in my analysis permit a greater intertextual study of magical healing spells and a better understanding of these spells’ relationships with materiality. Temple Rank and…
Read MoreJanuary 2017
Modelling Long-Distance Interaction in the Middle Bronze Age
The Old Assyrian trade network c. 1895-1865 BCE is by far the best documented example of how a long-distance commercial circuit was organized and run in the ancient world. But the Assyrian records show that the circuit to which they relate was not isolated. It formed part of a chain of comparable units and was kept intentionally separate from competing entities. This talk will explore some of those other linked and competing commercial networks of the Middle Bronze Age in…
Read MoreDivine Priestesses: The Ptolemaic Queens in the Egyptian and Hellenistic Cults
The Ptolemaic kings and queens were not only venerated as synnaoi theoi (‘temple-sharing gods’) in the Egyptian temples and received various cults of their own (including the Hellenistic and Egyptian ruler cults), but they also served as priests and priestesses themselves. In the ancient Egyptian understanding, the king was per definitionem the high priest. This lecture will focus on the queens serving as priestesses, both in the Hellenistic and the Egyptian contexts, and analyse how these two worlds were possibly…
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