This Monday, Mark Collier from the University of Liverpool exploring the development of Ancient Egyptian, the language with the longest recorded history in the world! No prior knowledge of hieroglyphs required! All welcome.
Monday 8th April 7:30pm Manchester Conference Centre / Pendulum Hotel, Sackville Street, Manchester, M3 1BB.
Saturday 30th March 9:30 – 16:30 at the Longfield Suite, Prestwich
Join MAES for an exciting study day focusing on domestic life in ancient Egypt, including houses and their constructions, woodworking techniques in furniture construction, household roles, family life, food and drink and domestic textiles.
Guest speakers: Geoffrey Killen (Egyptologist and Furniture historian); Peter Philips (Editor Ancient Egypt Magazine ), Joyce Tyldesley (Reader in Egyptology, University of Manchester) & Regina De Giovanni (specialist in domestic Egyptan textiles).
Download a booking form here:
MON 11TH MARCH NICKY NIELSEN
Facsimile painting from the tomb of Seti I
We welcome Nicky back to MAES to talk about an Egyptian king often overshadowed by his more famous son!
While Ramesses II’s successes condemned Seti I to spending his Afterlife very much in the shadow, his short reign was nevertheless a crucial period in the development of the Ramesside Period. This talk will cover Seti’s origins, his family and the early foundations of the period he helped to shape. It will investigate his role as a warrior and his successes as a builder and restorer of temples throughout Egypt. The talk will also discuss his death, his impressive burial and the different ways in which he’s been perceived and received by everyone from Classical authors, to 19th century freemasons and Hollywood script-writers.
Dr Nicky Nielsen is a Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Manchester. He specialises in Ramesside history, archaeology and material culture. He is publishing a biography of Seti I aimed at the general public in September 2018 with Pen & Sword Press.
All welcome: 7:30pm Manchester Conference Centre / Pendulum Hotel, Sackville Street, Manchester, M3 1BB.
Myriam Seco Álvarez
Our May meeting will now take place on Monday 20th May so we can welcome our special guest Myriam Seco Álvarez who will be revealing the latest discoveries of the Thutmosis III Temple Project at Luxor! Please make a note of the change of date in your diary!
Rosalie David’s lecture on Takabuti will now be presented in February 2020. She promises us she will have even more to reveal then!!!
We’re going botanical for our next MAES meeting! The wonderful Hilary Wilson – author of the Per Mesut features in Ancient Egypt Magazine – will be here on Monday 11th February!
Amarna Marsh Scene from the Louvre
Gifts of the Nile: Water Plants in Egyptian Culture
Along the banks of the Nile and Egypt’s many canals and irrigation channels grew a wealth of plant resources which were exploited from earliest times for a multitude of purposes. The common reeds, rushes and sedges, including papyrus, provided the raw materials for building, making furniture and even for clothing, and many of them assumed symbolic value within the Egyptian belief system. This talk explores the practical and cultural significance of these humble plants and their continuing importance for Egypt’s ecology.
Retired Maths teacher and Chairman of the Southampton Ancient Egypt Society, Hilary Wilson is now a free-lance lecturer and writer. She is author of several Egyptological books and articles as well as the Per Mesut pages in Ancient Egypt Magazine and, under the name Hilary Cawston, she writes fiction with an Egyptian theme.
Bookings are now open for our March Study day – Saturday 30th March at the Longfield Suite, Prestwich.
Location Location Location! Houses and Homes in Ancient Egypt
With
Join MAES for an exciting study day focusing on domestic life in ancient Egypt, including houses and their constructions, woodworking techniques in furniture construction, household roles, family life, food and drink and domestic textiles.
Booking form here:
Our next MAES meeting is on Monday 14th January (at the Pendulum Hotel / Manchester Conference Centre on Sackville Street from 7pm).
We welcome back our former Secretary and Chair, geologist Colin Reader who will present this year’s Bob Partridge Egyptology Lecture.
Over a number of years, Colin had the very good fortune to be asked to work with the late Ian Mathieson at North Saqqara, and has since been analysing Ian’s unpublished material – particularly with regard to the enigmatic and little understood Gisr el Mudir at Saqqara a site in which he himself has a keen interest. Today this is a very crowded site, with many tombs and temples from all periods of the Pharaonic Civilisation. But what was Saqqara like when the earliest pharaohs chose to build there and what influenced where they chose to build?
Members of the Saqqara Geophysical Survey Project carrying out topographic survey from the Gisr el Mudir. Photo: Colin Reader
As he did with the Great Sphinx of Giza, Colin has examined the famous necropolis of North Saqqara from an engineering geologist’s perspective. The results were rather surprising and have recently been published in JEA! In this lecture, Colin will share these findings, shedding light on Saqqara before the pyramids.
Colin is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, a Chartered Geologist and regular contributor to AE Magazine. He was first attracted to ancient Egypt by the controversy over the age of the Great Sphinx at Giza and what the weathering and erosion of that monument could tell us about its age. Colin then went on to research the geology of Egypt in broader terms, particularly the way the Egyptian landmass and features such as the Nile Valley and the Red Sea Hills, evolved. MAES members will of course know Colin well as our former Secretary and Chair!
Next Monday (10th December) Keith White will be discussing “Beautiful, Fair And Lovely Akhetaten”…. The Rhetoric And The Reality.
Tomb and temple scenes suggest Amarna was a city of plenty and a happy populace. But Keith White will show the reality was quite different!
Keith presents evidence from investigations over the last decade suggesting that the reality – at least for the non-elite – was very different, with malnutrition and disease common. Spinal and limb injuries also suggest a work-load that was excessive even for the average ancient Egyptian. Why was this such an unhealthy population? The likely explanation does not reflect well on the pharaoh whose obsession with rapidly establishing his city to his new god Aten in “this distant place” was at the expense of the ordinary Egyptian.
Everyone welcome! Monday 10th December 7:30pm Manchester Conference Centre / Pendulum Hotel, Sackville Street, Manchester, M3 1BB.
Jay Heidel
W Raymond Johnson
“Secrets of the Stones: Current Epigraphic
Surveys and Excavations at Thebes and Antinoupolis”
MAES is very pleased to welcome Raymond Johnson and Jay Heidel to Manchester to reveal their latest work in Luxor!
Three lectures on the Epigraphic survey of Medinet Habu, Luxor Temple and in private Theban tombs, reassembling Amarna talatat blocks and current excavations at Antinoupolis.
Booking has now closed but if you’d like to come you’d be welcome – pay on the door.
Saturday 17th November, 10am – 2pm
University of Manchester Samuel Alexander Building, Lime Grove (off Oxford Road), Manchester M13 9PP
This study day has been made possible thanks to the kind bequest of former MAES member Thelma Nolan-Bradburn.
Join the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society tonight to hear Alan Hayward tell the story of how an industrial town acquired a surprisingly high quality collection of objects from ancient Egypt. When Alan began to research the material, few objects had a known provenance and it was thought to have been the collection of two Victorian ladies. Marianne Brocklehurst, and her friend Mary Booth (known as the ‘MBs’), who were indeed central to the collection, but Amelia Edwards and Flinders Petrie had a significant impact and their involvement added much to the stories that many of the objects have to tell.
Alan Hayward began studying Egyptology after retiring as Chartered Engineer. West Park Museum in Macclesfield asked him to research the ancient Egyptian collection there and as a result he became honorary curator. He has recently retired from that role but is still involved with the museum, writes occasional articles for Ancient Egypt magazine and gives talks to local societies.
