We kick off the new season of the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society on Monday 9th September with a Zoom lecture from Aidan Dodson!

Like the vast majority of rulers of ancient Egypt, Thutmose III and Hatshepsut had vanished from human consciousness by the end of antiquity, with a few garbled echoes to be found in the surviving excerpts of Manetho. It was only with the decipherment of hieroglyphs that they began to emerge from the shadows. The novel status of Hatshepsut as both a woman and a king caused much head-scratching and bizarre theories before her position in history became generally accepted. Both pharaohs were great builders, and we will also trace how excavations have revealed their monuments and what they can tell us about the careers of the rulers themselves.

Professor Aidan Dodson has taught at the University of Bristol since 1996, and is a former Chairman of the Egypt Exploration Society. A graduate of Liverpool and Cambridge Universities, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2003, and is the author of some thirty books. ‘Thutmose III & Hatshepsut, Pharaohs of Egypt: their lives and afterlives’ is due to be published by the American University in Cairo Press at the beginning of 2025.

Everyone welcome. Free to MAES members (who will receive an email link). Guests (£5) can book via Eventbrite here:

Doors open 7:30pm GMT+1. The lecture begins at 8pm.

Current Research in Egyptology (CRE) is an annual postgraduate conference set up to facilitate research and promote bonds between British and international universities conducting research in Egyptology.

This year’s conference is being held at the University of Liverpool from 2-6 September and MAES members will be there representing the society. We will also be selling second-hand Egyptology books, so come and bag a bargain!

For more details and to book tickets, click here:

On Monday 8th July we have our final lecture of the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society – and our last ever venue lecture as we move to zoom-only for the new season! We are pleased to welcome back an old friend – Renee Friedman, who will be giving the Bob Partridge Egyptology Lecture in memory of our late Chair.

Hierakonpolis 40 Years On: My Favourite Discoveries

In 1983 Renee Friedman joined the Hierakonpolis Expedition, and over the years, progressing from pot-girl to site director, had the privilege to be part of many remarkable discoveries that have enhanced our understanding of ancient Egyptian civilization in the predynastic as well as later times. In this talk she reflects on her favourite (if not always the most famous) discoveries from over the past 40 years and shares some of the personal stories that surround them. 

Dr. Renée Friedman has directed the expedition to Hierakonpolis since 1996, fielding annual campaigns to explore various aspects of this vast site, the large of the Predynastic period still extant and accessible anywhere in the Nile Valley, Former Heagy Research Curator at the British Museum, she is currently a Senior Research Fellow of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford.

Everyone welcome. Free to MAES members – £5 for guests on the door. To be held at the Pendulum Hotel, Sackville Street, Manchester, M1 3BB. Doors open 7:15pm. The lecture begins at 8pm.

This Monday (13 May)  we welcome Sofia Aziz who is presenting a zoom lecture for the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society!

The Human Brain in Ancient Egypt: A Re-evaluation of its Function and Importance

Biomedical investigative techniques are gradually changing our understanding of mummification methods. Sofia’s research refutes long held claims that the brain was of no relevance to the ancient Egyptians. She will discuss how CT imaging, the medical papyri and archaeological records provide a wider understanding of ancient Egyptian medicine and the importance of the human brain in the afterlife. 

Sofia Aziz is a Biomedical Egyptologist with a lifelong passion for ancient Egypt. Her focus has been on understanding the health of the ancient Egyptians and the diseases from which they suffered . She has been involved in a range of publications, media consults and has appeared in a variety of TV documentaries. Her current research looks at neuroscience in ancient Egypt.

Everyone is welcome! The lecture is free to MAES members who will receive a link by email. Guests can join us via Eventbrite here – tickets £5.

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.   

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.

Unfortunately we will have to postpone our lecture with Hilary Wilson tonight. We will reschedule her lecture on Who Ate All The Fish in Ancient Egypt early in the New Year!

Our next meeting is at the Pendulum Hotel in Manchester on 11th December with Ken Griffin talking about the Harrogate Collection at Swansea, followed by our next zoom meeting with Aidan Dodson on the Nubian Pharaohs on 18th December.

Full details on our website:

Our next MAES meeting is on Monday – we hope you can join us!

13 November    ZOOM Hilary Wilson Who Ate all the Fish in Ancient Egypt?

Classical sources suggesting the existence of a taboo on eating fish in ancient Egypt seem to be at odds with the extensive physical remains of fish from Predynastic settlement sites as well as the vivid tomb images of fishing from the Old and Middle Kingdoms. By examining a combination of artistic, literary and modern archaeological evidence, Hilary Wilson re-evaluates traditional interpretations of ancient Egyptian attitudes towards the consumption of fish and demonstrates the dietary and economic importance of fish to different social groups. 

Hilary Wilson is a retired Maths teacher and former Open University lecturer. For many years she ran Adult Education courses in Egyptology for the University of Southampton and for WEA groups across Hampshire. She has written several books on popular Egyptology and is founder Chair of the Southampton Ancient Egypt Society. Hilary was awarded her MA in Egyptology from the University of Manchester in 2022. She is also a staff contributor to Ancient Egypt Magazine.

Free to MAES members. Guests welcome – book via Eventbrite.