We need to make a couple of changes to our Manchester AE Society programme so the previously advertised February and March speakers have been postponed. New speakers for these meetings will be announced shortly. The February 14th lecture will be on Zoom. We will also be deciding on whether or not to hold the March meeting at our usual venue – an announcement will be made at the end of the month.
Michael Tunnicliffe kicks off the MAES New Year on Monday 10th January, with a Zoom lecture covering a period often neglected by Egyptologists!
Michael Tunnicliffe: Late Roman Egypt: From Marcus Aurelius to the Empire Divided
Egypt became part of the Roman Empire from the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. Two hundred years later, Egypt was a significantly different country under Roman rule, but more change was to follow with the growth of Christianity and its adoption by the Roman Emperors in the 4th century. This lecture will explore Late Roman Egypt, from the reign of Marcus Aurelius to 395 when the mighty Roman Empire split into two separate parts.
Michael Tunnicliffe is a freelance lecturer for a number of Adult Education providers in the North West of England. He studied Theology at Birmingham and Cambridge and completed the University of Manchester’s Certificate in Egyptology. He has a particular interest in the intersection of Egyptology and biblical religion.
All welcome. Lecture free to MAES members. Guests £5 via Eventbrite Doors open 7:30pm. Lecture begins at 8pm.
Monday 13th December – Zoom
Not one but two lectures – a tour of two significant Egyptian collections with Rob Coles and Glynis Greaves who are committee members of MAES. Doors open 7:30pm – lectures begin at 8pm (GMT).
All welcome. Free to MAES members. Guests £5 – booking here:
Rob Coles: Munich’s Egyptian Treasures
The ‘Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst’ or ‘State Museum of Egyptian Art’, our main destination. The only museum outside Egypt dedicated exclusively to Egyptian art, a stunning collection of artefacts covering over 5,000 years of Egyptian history is displayed in a modern underground exhibition space, echoes of an Egyptian tomb. This talk aims to give an overview of this amazing collection.
Glynis Greaves: Rochdale’s Egyptian Collection – little known treasures
The museum known as “Touchstones” in Rochdale began life in 1885 as a municipal library, which was later extended to become the town’s Museum and Art Gallery. The museum owns an eclectic mix of artefacts, among them more than 2,000 objects from Ancient Egypt. The story of how these were acquired is fascinating and similar to that of many other Egyptian collections in the North West, such as Manchester, Bolton and Macclesfield. The collection at Rochdale, largely based on the excavations of Petrie from 1894 to 1927, is well provenanced, and although lacking large, monumental artefacts, is archaeologically significant and often of high quality. This talk will look at some of the characters involved in building this little known collection and aim to show some of its most interesting artefacts.
Alexandria – Melting Pot or Simmering Cauldron? Egyptians and Jews under the Ptolemies
Saturday 23rd October 9:30am – 4:30pm
Following the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years, presiding over one of the most wealthy, prestigious and powerful countries in the known world. This was an era of unprecedented change for Egyptian culture and society, ruled by Macedon-Greeks from a new capital – Alexandria – which became one of the most important cosmopolitan cities in the Near East. But with Egyptians, Greeks and Jews all living in the same space, tensions were likely to rise and, as the House of Ptolemy imploded from bitter sibling rivalries, corruption, intrigue, murder and civil unrest, the “Alexandrian mob” became a significant force in the power politics of Egypt. Meanwhile Rome – the rising power in the West – watched, waited and then stepped in.
In this study day, Michael Tunnicliffe and Sarah Griffiths will paint a vivid picture of Egypt’s last ancient dynasty, from Ptolemy I to the famous Cleopatra VII, exploring the changing political relationships within Alexandria and the fluctuating fortunes of the Jewish community, tracing the series of catastrophic events leading to Rome’s annexation of Egypt and the end of more than 3000 years of Pharaonic rule.
MAES members £30; please book your place using the booking form here:
Guests welcome – tickets £40 via Eventbrite here:
An EXTRA exclusive MAES meeting for September – all welcome!
Wojciech Ejsmond & Marzena Ozarek-Szilke: The Warsaw Mummy Project and the world’s first Mummy Mummy
The Warsaw Mummy Project aims to gain information on the state of health, medical practices, and burial traditions of the ancient Egyptian population through a comprehensive examination of ancient Egyptian mummies preserved at the National Museum in Warsaw. Recently the collection increased in number with the discovery of a new individual. Thanks to X-ray and CT analysis it appeared that one mummy in the collection was pregnant. The surprise was even greater because it was thought earlier to be the body of a male priest. It is the first such known case of an ancient Egyptian pregnant mummy. During the lecture, we would like to present her story and new facts since she is the subject of our ongoing research.
Wojciech Ejsmond is an archaeologist working at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences; Marzena Ożarek-Szilke is a physical anthropologist, palaeopathologist, and archaeologist who, with Wojciech, who is co-Director of the Warsaw Mummy Project. Both are graduates of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.
Free to MAES members. Guests welcome £5 via Eventbrite here:
We kick off our new season of MAES on Monday 13th September with a fascinatinglecture from Chris Naunton, which will be online via Zoom (and not at our normal venue as previously advertised). Online lectures are free to members! You can join here. Guests welcome – tickets £5 via Eventbrite.
The Lost Baths of Cleopatra and Other Disappearing Monuments
The Baths of Cleopatra? They were seen and recorded by numerous travellers, explorers and early Egyptologists but then seem to have disappeared from view. Since the nineteenth century almost no-one has written about them and even fewer people seem to have seen them. Have they disappeared, and if so, how can this have happened? Alexandria seems a special case so many of its most famous monuments including the tombs of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra having disappeared. But in fact, a similar story can be told of numerous sites and monuments around Egypt.
Dr Chris Naunton is an Egyptologist, writer and broadcaster and author of Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt and Egyptologists’ Notebooks. He has presented numerous television documentaries, including The Man Who Discovered Egypt (BBC4 2012), Secrets of King Tut’s Treasures (Channel 5, 2018) and Egypt’s Lost Pyramid (Channel 4, 2019). He was Director (CEO) of the Egypt Exploration Society from 2012 to 2016 and President of the International Association of Egyptologists from 2015 to 2019.
Our next lecture and sadly the last of the current season is on Monday 12th July.
[Fear not. A new and exciting series is being put together for our next season, starting in September.]
Eric Cline: 1177 BC – Egypt and the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
1177 BC was year that saw the collapse of once flourishing civilisations across the Mediterranean region – and Egypt did not escape the devastation. New studies of lake sediments, stalagmites in caves, and coring from lakes and lagoons, in regions stretching from Italy and Greece to Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran, all point ever more conclusively to the occurrence of a megadrought that impacted much of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean beginning ca. 1200 BC and lasting between 150 and 300 years. The notion is inescapable that we would do well to heed what happened to the flourishing kingdoms of the Aegean, Egypt, and the Eastern Mediterranean during the Collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, for we are not as far removed from those days as one might think; the COVID-19 pandemic has just exposed a vulnerability of modern societies to one of the forces of nature and should remind us of the fragility of our own world.
Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics, History, and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A National Geographic Explorer, NEH Public Scholar, Getty Scholar, and Fulbright Scholar with degrees from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. Eric is an active field archaeologist with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, including ten seasons at Megiddo (1994-2014), where he served as co-director before retiring from the project in 2014, and another ten seasons at Tel Kabri, where he currently serves as Co-Director. Eric is the author or editor of 20 books and nearly 100 articles; translations of his books have appeared in nineteen different languages.
Members free, £5 for guests via Eventbrite.
Our next lecture will be on Monday 14th June 2021. Entitled ‘Wonderful Things’, it explores Fifty Years of the Wellcome Collection in Swansea and will be presented by Dr. Ken Griffin. This talk will present the history of the collection, including many of the highlights. It will also feature a virtual tour of the Egypt Centre.
Please note this lecture starts at 7:30pm, not at 8pm. Sign in from 7:15 onwards. Members free, £5 for guests via Eventbrite. http://bit.ly/ManchesterAESocZoom
Fancy a tour of the Egypt Centre Swansea’s stores without leaving your lounge?
Join MAES for our June lecture on Monday 14th!Ken Griffin will be talking about “Wonderful Things: Fifty Years of the Wellcome Collection in Swansea” and giving us an online tour of the collection by the wonders of mobile phone and zoom!
With almost 6,000 objects, the Egypt Centre (Swansea University) contains the seventh largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the UK. The majority of these objects originate from the collection of Sir Henry Wellcome, which was dispersed by the Wellcome Trustees in 1971. This talk will present the history of the collection, including many of the highlights. It will also feature a virtual tour of the Egypt Centre.
Dr Ken Griffin is the Collections Access Manager at the Egypt Centre, Swansea. He is a former lecturer in Egyptology at Swansea University. His PhD research on the rekhyt-people has recently been published by Golden House Publications. Ken has excavated extensively in Egypt and Sudan over the last decade, including at Abydos and the Valley of the Kings.
Free to MAES members – link will be emailed round. Guests welcome – you can book (£5) via Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/maes-june-online-meeting-ken-griffin-swansea-egypt-collection-tickets-151462762199?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch
How did the Kushite pharaohs of Egypt take on the Assyrian empire? What impact did the Babylonians have on Israel and Judah? How was the powerful Persian empire stopped in its tracks?
This is the story of invasion and conquest, rebellion and survival in Egypt and the Near East, leading to the end of the native Egyptian pharaohs, the sacking of Thebes, the destruction of Jerusalem and the loss of Israel’s national independence.
Join us this Saturday (22nd May) 9:30am to 4:30pm to discover the changes brought about over this tumultuous period of 400 years!
A Study Day taught by Michael Tunnicliffe & Sarah Griffiths in association with the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society. All welcome. MAES members £20; guests £30
For more information and to download a booking form, click here:
Manchester Ancient Egypt Society 