Tag Archives: ancient Egypt

Empowering ancient Egyptian queens

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Queen 1

{credit}The National Museum of Antiquities{/credit}

If you find yourself near Leiden, home to Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands, make sure to visit the Queens of the Nile exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities, which promises to finally afford the wives of the pharoahs the attention they deserve. The exhibit of royal portraits, godly statues, lavish jewellery and accessories is curated by Leiden University students and PhD candidates, in addition to egyptologist Olaf Kaper.

“Too little attention has been paid to the wives of the pharoahs, both in science and in the museum world. I wanted to tell their history and show different aspects of life at court,” says Kaper.

According to Leiden University, the exhibition covers a period of 500 years and pays tribute to five queens of the era known as the “new empire”. Those queens were famed for their political prowess and divinity.

Among the showcase are two particularly valuable pieces, “the decorated granite cover of the sarcophagus of Queen Nefertari and a five-metre papyrus,” explains Kaper. “This enormous document is a legal text that describes the conspiracy against and the murder of Pharoah Ramses III by a group of ladies from the harem and a number of officials. It proves that women at that time were by no means happy to accept a subordinate role.”

This is the first major exhibit of its kind on the Egyptian queens in the Netherlands. It continues until 17 April 2017.

Mainz University Egyptologist to create massive digital inventory of hieroglyphic characters

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An Egyptian boy writing. Scribe, hieroglyphs, symbols denoting meaning. Carving in stone or painting. System of sign language. Ancient Egypt.

{credit}Macmillan South Africa{/credit}

Mainz University was given the go-ahead to start a long-term project to study ancient Egyptian cursive scripts – and make all the data accessible and searchable in digital format.

Cursive scripts were used in day-to-day interactions in ancient Egypt – written using rush stems and black or red ink on materials such as papyrus, linen, leather, wood, ceramics, plaster, and even stone, explains the press release by Mainz University. The style of writing was a modification of the detailed hieroglyphs – often seen carved on temple walls and ancient artifacts – and by studying it, the evolution and adaptation of handwriting to suit daily needs can perhaps be traced.

There are two types of scripts: hieratic and cursive. “Hieratic script was used for every stage of the ancient Egyptian language during 3,000 years and was only displaced in some contexts by demotic cursive script in the middle of the first millennium BC,” says the release.

The researchers will continue previous decades-long analysis of both scripts and their relation to hieroglyphs and to demotic script, but for the first time, they’re attempting to “compile a systematic and digital inventory of hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic characters from selected and significant sources, whereby different eras, regions, textual genres, and writing mediums for the documentation period from around 2700 BC to 300 AD will be taken into account.”

The analysis will also focus on the scripts’ emergence and development, the context of their use in additions to aspects such as the economy, the layout of manuscripts and the identification of individual scribes’ hands.

The project is expected to create a “digital paleography database,” a repertoire of characters, that will be available online, could be searched and inspected by international experts. Extensive metadata on all relevant sources will be provided, the project promises. Partial or special paleographies will be downloadable.

The project, titled “Ancient Egyptian Cursive Scripts: Digital Paleography and Systematic Analysis of Hieratic and Cursive Hieroglyphs,” is partly funded by the German government. It will be supervised by Egyptology Professor Ursula Verhoeven-van Elsbergen of the Department of Ancient Studies of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and will be spread over 23 years, receiving an annual grant of a little over $325,500.

Although the project is centered on the study of ancient Egypt, the actual work will take place in the Egyptology section at Mainz University and in the Computer Philology section at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Roman Egypt was home to “a good citizenship” youth organisation 2,000 years ago

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Ancient Egypt GOODSHOOT

{credit}© GOODSHOOT{/credit}

Following a study of over 7,500 ancient documents on papyrus, originating from Oxyrhynchos in Egypt and discovered over a hundred years back in a rubbish dump, University of Oslo and the University of Newcastle presented what is perhaps the most systematic research of childhood in Roman Egypt, according to the university’s website.

Among their discoveries? Some 2,000 years ago, Oxyrhynchos, a town of around 25,000 inhabitants, had a youth organisation, called a “gymnasium,” in which any free-born child could enroll – slaves and girls not allowed.

Somewhere between 10 and 25% of local Egyptian boys, in addition to Greek and Roman residents of Egypt would have qualified, but typically members of affluent families and higher tax classes enrolled, according to an overview of the study released earlier this month by social historian Ville Vuolanto of the University of Oslo and April Pudsey of the University of Newcastle.

Enrollment in the gymnasium marked the transition to adulthood.

“It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. By examining papyri, pottery fragments with writing on, toys and other objects, we are trying to form a picture of how children lived in Roman Egypt,” explains Vuolanto.

While well-off boys were part of the prestigious gymnasium, learning to be good citizens, others worked or landed what is termed “apprenticeship contracts,” mainly in the weaving industry. Either way, boys in ancient Egypt were not considered fully adult until they got married, usually in their early twenties. Most girls remained or worked at home, according to the study.

Slave children could also become apprentices, however, unlike “free-born” citizens they lived with their owners or “masters” not their parents during. Vuolanto says that children as young as two were separated from kin and sold as slaves.

“Little is known about the lives of children until they turn up in official documents, which is usually not before they are in their early teens,” says University of Oslo’s press release.