Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Report from ICE XI X

I have a lot to catch up on:

Yesterday afternoon, James K. Hoffmeier showed that the great hymn to the Aten, which is normally thought to be a composition from late in Akhenaten's reign had to have come earlier in the reign, before year 9.

Lucia Diaz-Iglesias Llanos discussed the Book of the Dead found in the tomb of Djehuty, an early Eighteenth Dynasty official. She made the case that there were at least three different scribes in the tomb. She also discussed the numerous sorts of textual errors made by the copyists.

Holger Kockelmann discussed the gate guardians in temples and amassed material from the early dynastic period through Coptic times (and even into medieval times) on his subject.

This morning E. Liptay showed how Sed-Festival imagery was used in certain Twenty-First Dynasty Coffins.

Corina van den Hoven discussed he coronation ritual at Edfu and brought forth evidence that not only were officials anointed in ancient Egypt, but that kings were probably as well.

Angus Graham discussed coring work at Luxor and his team's attempt to reconstruct the floodplain in the area. He showed that based on the work they have been able to do so far, most of what Egyptologists have assumed about the placement of the river is likely wrong.

This afternoon, Alessandra van Lieven discussed how a number of the Coffin Texts (which are usually regarded as funerary) have to have been used by the living. She also discussed one of them in particular, which was a ritual for the prolonging of one's life that was performed every New Year.

Melanie Flossmann-Schutze discussed her project at Tuna el-Gebel and how they are trying to integrate archaeological and textual sources to understand the history of the site.

There were some other good papers that I chose not to highlight, and some not so good papers that I am skipping over. So far it has been a good conference with lots of interesting papers.