Date: Saturday, February 18, 2012 3:00 p.m.

Chapter: Arizona

Presenter: Nigel Studwick, assistant keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum

Location: University of Arizona Book Store in the Student Union Memorial Center, 1209 E. University Blvd., Tucson, Az., 85721.  (Speedway Blvd. to Mountain Ave., south on Mountain Ave.  Student Union is straight ahead, and a parking garage to the left.).  Call 520-621-2814 for more information.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Description: While the first hieroglyphs may now go back to 3400 BC, it was in the Old Kingdom that the first continuous texts appeared. This lecture will have a look at the different types of text which exist from that time (except the Pyramid Texts). Old Kingdom kings left a number of decrees of special exemptions for temples, and these were well and truly set in stone and placed in the monuments they concern. Any Egyptian official who could afford it made an elaborate tomb with inscriptions, which range from the straightforward expressions of wishes for offerings to self-laudatory and probably not very objective biographies. Egypt is also seen as the home of bureaucracy, and the Old Kingdom has left us the earliest accounts papyri, from Gebelein and Abusir, which show more ordinary people at work, their job rotas, and give some clues about the rituals which took place in the Abusir temples.