On Saturday 11 June 2011, the EES hosted a Saturday Seminar at the University of Durham. Angus Graham attended and has sent his personal view of this very successful event:
‘The Self Presentation of Ancient Egyptian Rulers and Their Subjects’ was a very enjoyable, extremely interesting and informative day instigated by Heba Abd El-Gawad and chaired by Penny Wilson. Liz Frood kicked the day off with a review of ‘Elite representation in the late second, and early first millennium BC’ looking at the evidence of inscriptions, stelae and statues and critically their context from the Temple of Buhen (now in Khartoum Museum), the Temple at Wadi es-Sebua and the temple complex of Karnak. She very neatly led up to the period and material discussed by Campbell Price.
Stela of the Viceroy Hori from Buhen (EES Lucy Gura Archive)
Campbell addressed the self-presentation of ‘Non-royal individuals in the Late Period’ through the corpus of stone statuary found in the Karnak cachette. They both opened up fascinating issues concerning the placement and location of inscriptions, statuary and stelae within the temples as well as the (re)presentation of the individual and role of the statue
After the lunch break John Baines began an afternoon situated within the Ptolemaic Period by taking us step-by-step through the translation of a number of texts to interpret the roles and presentation of ‘Women in the Ptolemaic Period’. The day was rounded off by Heba Abd El Gawad’s discussion of ‘The King in the Ptolemaic Period’. Heba opened her discussion of propaganda by looking at some very recent examples of the presentation of heads of state. She then moved on to the presentation of the Ptolemies and how they negotiated their place within Egypt and also within a much broader political sphere. I listened to all this material with a great deal of interest and have taken away lots of food for thought. A very good way to spend a Saturday indeed!’
A Ptolemaic royal stela from The Bucheum at Armant (EES Lucy Gura Archive)
The Society is very grateful to Heba Abd El-Gawad for initiating this event and for her hard work organizing it, and to Elizabeth Frood, Campbell Price, John Baines, Heba herself and Penny Wilson for their contributions to the first EES Saturday Seminar held outside London. We hope it will be the first of many!