The next Manchester Ancient Egypt Society lecture is a VENUE lecture on Monday 11th March with a special opportunity to see replicas demonstrating furniture-making techniques .

Pendulum Hotel, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB 7:45pm start.

Free to MAES members; Guests £5 on the door.

Geoffrey Killen: William Arnold Stewart – How he reconstructed the royal furniture of Queen Hetepheres. 

In 1925 the tomb of Queen Hetepheres, the mother of the pharaoh Khufu, was discovered at Giza by a team from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Harvard University led by George Andrew Reisner. The Queen’s tomb was found in a poor state of preservation, but it became apparent that it contained the Queen’s royal furniture. All the wood had decayed to a fine powder which Reisner suggested resembled cigar ash. He decided that the furniture should be reconstructed using the surviving material. He employed William Arnold Stewart, a British artist and director of the Cairo School of Arts and Decorations, to attempt the furniture’s reconstruction. Stewart was to develop a number of innovative techniques to reconstruct the furniture and wrote a detailed conservation diary. Unfortunately, Stewart died before his manuscript could be published.

Dr Geoffrey Killen, together with the assistance of Helen Farrar and Julie Dawson, has completed and edited Stewart’s manuscript which will be published shortly by the Griffith Institute. This lecture discusses Stewart’s imaginative and pioneering work that should be seen as an important contribution to the early preservation of ancient artefacts. The lecture will include replicas made by Dr Killen to analyse the techniques developed by Stewart in a small mud brick workshop in the shadow of Khufu’s Great Pyramid.

Geoffrey Killen is a leading ancient furniture historian, technologist and Egyptologist. He has studied the collections of Egyptian furniture at most of the major world museums and has written four major works on his specialism, as well as being a contributor to Nicholson and Shaw’s: “Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology”; Redford’s: “The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt” and Anderson’s: “A Cultural History of Furniture in Antiquity”. He has also led in the field of experimental archaeology where making and using replica woodworking tools and equipment has generated and tested archaeological hypotheses. His practical work is now displayed together with those original artefacts in several British museums.