ancient_egypt

Middle Kingdom Excavations at Karnak

/ MAES Administrator

This coming Monday, the Manchester AE Society presents an extra lecture – open to MAES members (free by email link) and guests (£5 – book on Eventbrite here:). All welcome. Please note on Monday we will out of British Summer Time so all timings are GMT. Doors open 7:45pm and the lecture begins at 8pm!

26th October: Matthieu Vanpeene

Opened in 2021 as part of the “Karnak des origines” and the “Karnak à l’est de Karnak” research programme (MEAE/CFEETK), the excavations undertaken by the Centre Franco Égyptien d’Étude des Temples de Karnak (CFEETK, MoTA/CNRS) at the south-eastern corner of the Amun-Re temple enclosure were initially intended to establish a reliable chronology for the development of Thebes in the third millennium BC.

The excavations, which follow on from the work carried out in the Legrain, Lortet and Franchet sector at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to the rediscovery of a relatively dense settlement which, at its height, lay outside the temple walls. Centred around a street, the remains -remarkably well preserved for this period – provide glimpses of large buildings devoted to storage and food processing, forming part of a larger neighbourhood that remains to be investigated. Drawing on this material, the presentation will offer an insight into daily life in the capital of Egypt during the Middle Kingdom.

A specialist in construction in ancient Egypt, Matthieu Vanpeene is an architect who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville (ENSAPB) and completed an Egyptology PhD at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, PSL) in 2021. Since 2010, he has been studying various sites in Egypt, from the Alexandrian coast to Aswan. After six years as Head of the Architecture and Archaeology Department at the Centre Franco Égyptien d’Étude des Temples de Karnak (CNRS, UAR 3172), he joined the HiSoMA research team (CNRS, UMR 5189) and now leads the mission of the Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale (Ifao) at Dendera, middle Egypt.

THE LIBYAN PHARAOHS!

/ MAES Administrator

This Monday (9 March), the Manchester AE Society welcomes back Professor Aidan Dodson!

Everyone welcome. Free to MAES members (you will receive a link via email) and guests welcome – tickets £5 by Eventbrite here. Doors open 7:30pm (GMT) and the lecture runs 8 til 9pm.

The Libyan Pharaohs of Egypt and their Rediscovery

During the tenth through seventh centuries BC, Egypt was ruled by a series of pharaohs of Libyan ancestry. The Libyans had hitherto been enemies of the Egyptians, with conflicts going back into the third millennium BC. Yet early in the tenth century BC, the first of a long series of pharaohs of Libyan descent ascended the Egyptian throne.

Although the earlier Libyan pharaohs seem to have maintained the tradition of a unitary Egyptian state, as time went by Libyan ideas of decentralised control became more prevalent. As a result, we find individuals holding both Libyan and Egyptian titles controlling distinct territories around Egypt, some of whom assumed the names and titles of a pharaoh. Conflict sometimes accompanied this process, with a long civil war fought for the control of southern Egypt and the great religious capital of Thebes. Some degree of central control was imposed with the advent of a further set of rulers from Nubia during the eighth century, but a single Egyptian state would not be restored until the middle of the seventh century. In this lecture, Aidan will explore some of the strands of history of this often-ignored era of Egyptian history, including the way in which the protagonists were rediscovered by modern historians and archaeologists.

Aidan Dodson is honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol, where he has taught since 1996, Associate Editor of Ancient Egypt Magazine, and a regular speaker in the MAES calendar. He is the author of some thirty books, and his The Libyan Pharaohs of Egypt: their lives and afterlives has just been published by the American University in Cairo Press.