This page contains the abstracts for the 13th Birmingham Egyptology Symposium. The abstracts have been organised in order of the programme.
You can check out the presenter bios of each presenter on our Bios page.
Sebastián Francisco Maydana: From Marginality to Godhood: Human-Animal Relations at the beginning of Egyptian History
The Predynastic Period is characterised by an almost total lack of textual evidence. For this reason, it is usually neglected by researchers and often considered to be outside the scope of true Egyptological studies. While this makes sense from a disciplinary point of view, considering how the foundational event of this discipline is the decipherment of hieroglyphs, from a historical standpoint it constructs an arbitrary divide that does not reflect the reality of sociopolitical processes that happened during the Predynastic. Indeed, these processes are among the most transformative and long-standing in the history of ancient Egypt. Not having written sources only means that researchers need to deal primarily with multiple other sources, including iconography, archaeology, zooarchaeology, climate studies and anthropology. Adopting such a multidisciplinary approach, I am currently studying the possible paths through which the Nile Valley transitioned from a collection of scattered hamlets to a centralised state-society in just a few centuries by the end of the Predynastic Period. In this paper, I will explore the main changes that allowed for a permanent form of leadership to emerge in Egypt, in a context of progressive rise of aridity and an increase in long-distance exchange.
One striking feature of said transformations, especially when examining the iconography of the period, is the extent to which they involve interactions between humans and animals. This study argues that animals were not merely regarded as economic resources but instead were active components in the construction of elite identity. In this sense, and with the hopes of opening a dialogue on this subject, the main focus of this paper will be the discussion of these human-animal interactions, both in practice and representation.
Jake Colloff: Knowing Ancient Egypt: The Emic/Etic Binary and its Epistemological Issues
Upon their introduction to the field of anthropology, the terms “emic” and “etic” gave vocabulary to two strains of decipherment long present in the study of human cultures. Soon after they were proposed however, debate arose surrounding both their meaning and usefulness. Nevertheless, the terms have continued to live on in various academic fields including that of Egyptology. Arguments can be made however that the terms have served to do more harm than good within this field. Despite their growing prevalence, there has been little sustained discussion of what emic and etic signify within an Egyptological context. Instead, individual scholars have adopted varying definitions, imported from differing linguistic and ethnographic traditions that engage with fundamentally different types of evidence and epistemic assumptions than those available to Egyptology. This presentation traces the intellectual development of these terms through anthropology into Egyptology and looks to demonstrate the hermeneutical and epistemological challenges that arise from accepting this binary of approaches. The aim of this talk is not to discourage interdisciplinary engagement (on the contrary, such exchanges are essential to the continued development of the field), but to emphasize the need for greater theoretical rigor when importing such ideas and terminologies.
Trent Hugler: Erased to be seen? A Reassessment of the Epigraphic Interventions on Hatshepsut’s Obelisks at Karnak
Erasure, modifications, and reuse—through means of restoration, recarving, and substitution—are stratigraphic and materially constrained phenomena. When multiple phases of epigraphic intervention are identified on a particular monument, the nature of the carving, its sequence, and architectural context are crucial for understanding the intention behind them. But what happens when two identical, adjacent monuments display markedly different patterns of erasure and reuse over time?
This conundrum is most pertinently illustrated by Hatshepsut’s obelisks in Karnak’s Amun precinct. Two obelisk pairs were erected in her reign: the wadyt-obelisks between the fourth and fifth pylons, later partially concealed by a 20-metre retaining wall in Thutmose III’s sole reign; and the eastern obelisks, part of Hatshepsut’s easternmost Karnak monument, dismantled early in Thutmose III’s sole reign, although the obelisks remained standing. Despite their similarity in form and decoration, these obelisks experienced varying epigraphic interventions, significantly more complex than erasing scenes on temple walls.
This paper reconsiders the changes on Hatshepsut’s obelisks and how these relate to her damnatio memoriae and later restorations. I begin by discussing the architectural setting of Central Karnak during Hatshepsut and Thutmose III’s co-rule. The context of erasures and scenes targeted are then compared. Such analysis reveals that on the eastern obelisks, the erasure of Hatshepsut extended to the pyramidion, on the southern wadyt-obelisk, it ceased just below the uppermost decorative register, while the northern wadyt-obelisk’s inscriptions were left entirely intact. Later restorations under Tutankhamun and Seti I, following the proscription of Amun in Akhenaten’s reign, reveal that these earlier constraints had been overcome, for these post-Amarna interventions extended the obelisks’ full shafts. Together, the obelisks demonstrate that Hatshepsut’s damnatio memoriae at Karnak was organised ergonomically with accessibility playing a key role, shaped by monumental height, surrounding architecture, and available workspace.
Michael Moore: Reading Queenship: Royal Women and Visual Authority in Egypt and Hatti
Powerful queens such as Tiye of Egypt and Puduhepa of Hatti appear frequently in the monumental and archival record of the Late Bronze Age, yet the visual strategies used to communicate queenship differed significantly across cultures. This paper examines how gender and royal authority were encoded in writing and iconography in Egypt and Hatti, with particular attention to how these signs may have been perceived by non-literate viewers.
In Egyptian royal inscriptions, queens are identified primarily through titulary, especially the title ḥmt-nswt (“King’s Wife”), and through the cartouche enclosing the queen’s name. While these phonetically written titles clearly signal queenship to literate audiences, they provide few visual cues to gender for viewers unable to read hieroglyphs unless accompanied by figural representations or female determinatives.
Hittite seals and monumental inscriptions employing Anatolian hieroglyphs offer a contrasting case. Here queenship is communicated visually through the logogram DOMINA (“”Queen””), which depicts the head of a woman and thus marks female royal authority in a form legible even to viewers unable to read the accompanying text.
A particularly revealing point of cross-cultural contact appears in the Egyptian account of the Egyptian-Hittite treaty, which records the seal of the Hittite queen Puduhepa. This passage preserves an Egyptian attempt to describe a Hittite queen’s seal within an Egyptian textual framework, highlighting the differing graphic conventions through which queenship was expressed and recognized.
These contrasting graphic conventions reflect differences in Egyptian and Hittite conceptualizations of royal women and their authority. Whereas Egyptian queenship was primarily articulated through relational titles tied to the king, Hittite queenship was visually marked in ways that rendered female royal authority legible to all audiences, even when a queen’s power was exercised in her own right. Such conventions are consistent with a model of “corporate monarchy,” in which royal authority was distributed among the king, his consort, and other members of the royal family.
Emily Whitehead: Visible Standardisation, Hidden Innovation: The Question of ‘Appropriate’ Variation in Middle Kingdom Coffins
Middle Kingdom coffins, particularly during the reigns of Senwosret I through to the end of Senwosret III, have been argued to have become standardised. However, considerable variation and innovation remain in the making of coffins during this period. This paper uses the burials of Sepi II and Sepi III at Dayr al-Barshā to question how these coffins vary and where it might be appropriate to have variation in a Middle Kingdom coffin. These two men shared similar elite status and a close spatial association in their burials, conditions under which we might expect very similar and highly standardised burial assemblages. Instead, the comparison shows that both burials, along with three others in nearby shafts, are outwardly very similar, but differ markedly in their interior programmes.
Using assemblage theory and the concept of decorum as analytical tools, this paper examines Sepi III’s burial assemblage to show how certain images and textual programmes constitute what is appropriate for elite Dayr al-Barshā burials, while still allowing for innovation. By comparing Sepi III’s coffins with the assemblage of Sepi II, in particular, I argue that variation is largely negotiated in less visible spaces, the interior decoration. This comparative case study demonstrates that standardisation in Middle Kingdom elite coffins at Dayr al-Barshā emerges not from the exclusion of variation and innovation, but from the negotiation of a shared set of forms, texts and images across multiple scales.
Thaisy Nogueira Palmuti: Ancient Egypt in Brazilian Private Collecting: The Yunes and Setúbal Collections
The Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY) and the collection of the Instituto Casa da Prata, assembled by Olavo Setúbal, are Brazilian private collections that house Egyptian artifacts. Formed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these collections are not publicly known and have not yet been the subject of scholarly study. This presentation discusses the ongoing master’s research project entitled “From Private to Public: Collection Histories, Cataloguing and Dissemination of the Egyptian Collections of Yunes and Setúbal” which analyzes these holdings for the first time. The research investigates the formation of these collections within the broader context of art collecting in Brazil during this period, examining both their acquisition trajectories and the objects themselves, individually and as cohesive groups. It seeks to understand which perspectives on Ancient Egypt are privileged, which narratives are mobilized, and how each collector constructs and recontextualizes this past. From the perspective of Public Archaeology, the project also proposes strategies for disseminating these artifacts through the production of a scholarly catalogue for each collection and the development of three dimensional models of the objects, generating interactive images to be made available online. In doing so, the research aims to contribute to discussions on private collecting, the circulation of cultural goods, and the ways in which Ancient Egypt is appropriated and reinterpreted outside its original context.
Thomas Clarke; Elsbeth Geldhof; Giulia Moretti; Flavia Ravaioli; Helen Strudwick: Investigating a Ptah-Sokar-Osiris figure at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
In preparation for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘Made in Ancient Egypt’ exhibition (3 October 2025–12 April 2026), the museum has undertaken a programme of research into a selection of objects from its own collection that were to be displayed in the exhibition. In line with our usual interdisciplinary approach, this combined Egyptological research, the application of a variety of analytical techniques and detailed study as part of conservation work.
This paper will present interim results of the study of one of those objects: a complex Ptolemaic Ptah-Sokar-Osiris figure (accession number E.2.1916). A full translation of its text is in the course of preparation, together with an investigation into its acquisition history and likely original provenance. In conjunction with this, the object underwent extensive conservation and material identification using a series of non-destructive analytical techniques, including micro X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). High-resolution imaging methods such as 3D digital microscopy, visible-light induced luminescence (VIL) and X-radiography, deepened our understanding of the woodwork construction of base, figure and crown, the painting techniques and the dispersal of the Egyptian blue pigment. Further study of the back of the object is still required, including translation of the texts after more cleaning and consolidation has been carried out.
Deniz Meral Ardic: Orientalism, Capitalism, Colonialism- How Japan has shaped Ancient Egypt and itself anew
Ancient Egypt has fascinated around the world, but seldomly does it manage to capture a whole society like Japans. First exposed via small expeditions in the 19th and 20th Century to a small elite, it soon spread to become a cultural wildfire. Travelling exhibitions astounded and inspired millions of individuals, suddenly able to place themselves in the colonialist idea of a “decent” cultural hierarchy. The polytheistic religion(s), visual language and status of “Uniqueness” cemented the adoration of Ancient Egypt within the popular Zeitgeist. Other than scholarly sources, the populous was driven to the capitalist representation of this ‘found’ equal and ideal of what to represent as a “civilised” culture through the framework of colonialist ideas. Museums began featuring permanent installations and artists reframed their cultural identity through hieroglyphs
and the unique visual languages they shared. Popular culture itself followed suit, this in an attempt to further legitimise its own customs, which had often been described as being “primitive” and “animalistic” by driving colonialist powers. As such, it is of no surprise that the populous specifically sought- and still seeks- to represent itself through the lens of Ancient Egypt. Be it via exhibitions drawing in the Japanese royal family, popular media featuring fusions of Japanese & ancient Egyptian motifs, or
museums casting famous actors to lure in visitors; Capitalism has intertwined itself with how certain cultures have been deemed “civilised” and “decent” and how they constitute “Taste”. The intricate relationships between Japan, colonialist forces that shaped it, and ‘found’ brethren like Ancient Egypt, lend themselves to these questions: Does the representation of Ancient Egypt within Japanese popular culture lead to actual appreciation? Or does it not evade the pitfalls of becoming a mere instrument, a shallow façade, to legitimise itself on the global cultural stage of former colonialist powers?
Gemma Blanch Soriano: Alma Tadema’s Egypt at the Cadbury Research Library
Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema was among the most popular and well-paid artists of his time. However, after he died in 1912, his legacy was slowly forgotten until the last decades of the 20th century, when academia, and especially Egyptology, rediscovered his archaeologically fascinating creations.
This paper presents the preliminary results of the research conducted last summer on the Egyptian materials of Alma Tadema at the Cadbury Research Library (CRL). The vast personal archive of the artist, now kept at the University of Birmingham, includes hundreds of preparatory sketches with explanatory notes, photographic materials, and a catalogue of his personal library. All these are very relevant to understanding the artist’s creative process, who produced some of the most influential Egyptian-themed artworks that strongly shaped the public’s perception of ancient Egypt.
Alma Tadema’s fixation on representing archaeological elements in his works with meticulous detail allows identification of artefacts from museum collections on his canvases (e.g., the British Museum, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden). Subsequently, it was widely assumed that Wilkinson’s (1837) Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians exerted an omnipresent influence on the Dutch artist’s work. Nevertheless, after examining his portfolios at the CRL, it is visible that the painter consulted other Egyptological materials, leading to the identification of pieces from other museum collections in his works.
Lawrence Webb: Assemblages of Perception: The display of groups of Egyptian objects in museums
Not only does the movement of objects into museum collections add to the object’s biography, it also changes visitor perceptions of them. Archaeological objects become museum objects, which are subject to certain norms and conventions of representation, being viewed by visitors in certain ways with prefigured expectations. Similarly, when objects are brought together spatially within a museum, they are also brought together conceptually (whether in comparison, opposition or in some other relation). Thus, these artificial assemblages facilitate the creation of new meanings by visitors, and offer different representations of Egypt.
Here, I attempt to draw out and compare some of the representations of ancient Egypt offered to visitors created through such museum constructed assemblages, looking at examples from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, the British Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge). Using semiological and phenomenological approaches as well as existing architecture and museological literature concerning the conceptualisation of museum space, I seek to address the question of what it means for different ancient Egyptian (and other) objects to be brought together in the museum setting, and how this conceptual conjoining can reinforce or help dispel historical western conceptions of ancient Egypt.