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Despite the great buildings and seemingly large amounts of material evidence of ancient Egypt that we can observe today, our knowledge of the people who inhabited the past is very limited. The aim of this lecture is to provide an overview of the nature of the materials through which Egyptologists attempt to reconstruct the dynamics of this distant past.
In order to do this, the talk will be divided in two parts, which will present research questions and methodologies of two case studies at their current state:
- The first part of the lecture will present some of the results of the 19th field season of the Djehuty Project (CSIC) in Dra Abu el-Naga, Luxor, Egypt, focusing on the remarkable finding of an intact child burial. The discovery, which took place on January 22nd 2020, presents us with an opportunity to improve our understanding of how children lived (and died) during the end of the 17th dynasty (ca. 1550 BCE). The lecture will present an overview of the excavation process and the preliminary interpretation of its results, together with the questions that we are hoping to answer through the careful analysis of the data.
- The second part of the lecture will show a series of materials related to the excavations of the ancient necropolis of North Saqqara –a project funded by the RCC and Harvard University. Dated to the Early Dynastic period (ca. 3000 BCE), the humongous funerary structures in the area have raised important questions about the social hierarchy and political organization of what is still considered the formative period of the ancient Egyptian state.
The lecture will present research questions that this study hopes to respond to, showing available evidence and potential methodologies–formed by both archival documents and museum materials.
Speaker: Sergio Alarcón Robledo. PhD Candidate, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
Sponsor: RCC.