The next Manchester Ancient Egypt Society lecture is on Monday 8th January with a look at the founder of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom! All welcome! Doors open 7:30pm (GMT). Free to MAES members. Guests welcome – book at Eventbrite here:

Maarten Praet: Reconsidering Mentuhotep II: Evidence from Museum Collections in Greater Manchester

The importance of King Mentuhotep II in current Egyptological narratives cannot be understated. Mentuhotep II is said to have reunited Egypt after a period of political fragmentation, and to have made important artistic, political, societal, and religious innovations that would become part of the ancient Egyptian canon for the next 2000 years. Nevertheless, his reign is still poorly understood, leaving many questions unanswered. My doctoral research aims to provide some answers that can fundamentally improve our understanding of this transitional time period in ancient Egyptian history. Much of the evidence for the life and reign of Mentuhotep II is yet to be comprehensibly studied and published. For instance, there remains a wealth of unpublished iconographic, textual and object-related data from his funerary temple in Deir el-Bahari, which is now preserved in museum collections in the UK and worldwide. This is also the case for collections in Greater Manchester, such as the Bolton Museum, Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, and the Manchester Museum. This talk aims to show my ongoing study on these objects from collections in Greater Manchester, and how they can aid in expanding our understanding of the seminal reign of Mentuhotep II.

Maarten Praet is a Ph.D. student in Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the Johns Hopkins University in the USA. Before starting his doctoral degree in the US, he earned three MA degrees – in ancient history, archaeology, and Egyptology – at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Maarten has extensive archaeological fieldwork experience both in Egypt, where he excavated in sites such as Deir el-Bersha and the Mut temple precinct at Karnak, and Belgium. He also has experience working in museums, such as the British Museum in London and the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum in Baltimore. In his Ph.D. dissertation, “The Reign of Mentuhotep II Reconsidered”, he uses the previously unstudied objects and decorated wall fragments of Mentuhotep II’s funerary complex in Deir el-Bahari to study this king’s important artistic, political, societal, and religious innovations that would become part of the ancient Egyptian canon for the next 2000 years.