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.

Saturday 21^st October 10.30am– 3.30pm (GMT+1) Via Zoom

ABYDOS: HISTORY, DISCOVERIES AND THE WORK OF THE AHMOSE AND TETISHERI PROJECT, JOHN GARSTANG AND THE EES.

An online study day with Stephen Harvey, Campbell Price & Gina Criscenzo-Laycock

       MAES members £19 via booking form; Guests £30 via Eventbrite

Abydos is one of the most important archaeological areas in Egypt – an ancient cult centre, site of the earliest royal burials, and temples such as the famous Temple of Sety I with its Osirion.

Join Stephen Harvey, Campbell Price and Gina Criscenzo-Laycock as they explore the complex history of the site through the work of the Ahmose and Tetisheri Project, John Garstang and the EES.

All welcome!!!!

Our October ZOOM meeting looks at the later years of the reign of Ramesses II with Peter J Brand.

Monday 9th October doors open 7:30pm lecture begings 8pm (GMT+1)

All welcome! Free to MAES members. Guests can book by Eventbrite.

In his 34th year as Pharaoh, Ramesses II celebrated his second jubilee, married a Hittite princess and, unbeknownst to him, reached the halfway point of his sixty-seven-year reign. The occasion also signalled an increased emphasis on his status as a living god expressed through temples, statuary, imagery, and literature dedicated to his worship and glorification as Ramesses-the-great-god. As the years rolled on, the king grew older and increasingly frail. Divine kingship became a useful façade behind which the elderly king could be shielded from public view as age and infirmity overcame him. While he continued to reign until the end, in his last years, the crown prince Merenptah ruled in his name. Remarkably, Ramesses II’s mummy has survived as a unique artefact of his reign and tells us more about his humanity than any statue or inscription. From it we know what medical afflictions troubled him over the course of a lifespan that stretched into his late eighties or early nineties. 

Dr Peter J. Brand is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis, USA. He is also a director of the Karnak Hypostyle Hall Project, and specialises in the history and culture of ancient Egypt during its imperial age (c. 1550-1100 BC). He is the author of ‘The Monuments of Seti I and Their Historical Significance’ and ‘Ramesses II, Egypt’s Ultimate Pharaoh’.

We kick off the new Manchester Ancient Egypt Society season on Monday 11th September with a look at the more comical aspects of visiting Egypt!

Free to MAES members. Guests welcome via Eventbrite

11 September   ZOOM   Lee Young

The Lighter Side of Egypt with the Art of Lance Thackeray

Lance Thackeray was an English illustrator, known especially for his comic sporting illustrations involving billiards and golf and for his many humorous postcards. When he was over 30 he spent some winters in Egypt and produced humorous sketches which he collected in a book, The Light Side of Egypt (1908). In this lecture we will concentrate on his time in Egypt where he would gently poke fun at the tourists of his time. We will also look at the tourist industry as a whole in Egypt.

Lee Young is an independent researcher and lecturer in Egyptology specialising in artists and epigraphers in Egypt. She has studied the works of Howard Carter and Lance Thackeray (amongst others), and has a particular interest in bringing the greatly overlooked women artists to the public’s attention. Lee worked for several years at the Griffith Institute, part of Oxford University, cataloguing the watercolour paintings held there and doing the same for the Egypt Exploration Society. She also transcribed all 415 letters of Myrtle Broome held by the Griffith and is the author of ‘An Artist in Abydos: The Life and Letters of Myrtle Broome’, published by AUC Press.