Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London

After a brief but successful period of ruling Egypt as the 25^th Dynasty the kings of Napata returned to their southern home base in the Sudan. Thereafter, as an independent kingdom, based first at Napata and later at Meroe, their separate culture developed in an individual manner.

Existing African cultural elements were retained, but many motifs and features from Egyptian sources, which had been assimilated during the preceding centuries of contact, remained evident, especially in religious iconography, funerary architecture and presentation of kingship. It seems that these were considered useful to enhance their prestige although classic Egyptian aspects were adapted to suit Sudanese cultural needs.

Objects excavated at Meroe by Professor J. Garstang and now in the collection of the Petrie Museum indicate the importance of Egyptian motifs such as the ram of Amun-Ra, kheperi scarab beetle, and the ankh life sign. Decoration and monuments of the Meriotic period provide additional evidence of this. The significance of funerary pyramids with chapels and changes in their decorative programme appears to be related to the public role of kingship. Colossal statuary, reliefs of the ruler smiting enemies, and the ruler shown among the gods on temple walls enhances this.

Institute of Archaeology, University College London

After millennia of encounters between ancient Egypt and the Sudanese Nile valley, a wide range Pharaonic iconography and elements of ritual practice were adopted in the Sudan, highly visible in the archaeological record of the Meroitic kingdom. Conventional discussion of the social and economic organisation of the Meroitic kingdom draw upon our understanding of the bureaucratic ancient Egyptian state. In recent years an alternative model of a segmentary state has been elaborated drawing upon ethnohistorical parallels from the Sudan and west Africa. Rather than seeing the Meroitic state as a uniformly controlled and integrated power structure, the Sudanic model suggests a more symbolic state with varying degrees of authority imposed at different distances from the kingdom’s centre. Within this segmentary system, long distance trade in ‘prestige’ materials can be seen as lubricating and maintaining political ties. Just as the economy, such as long distance trade, needs to been seen in the context of social and political relations, Meroitic-Egyptianoid ritual symbolism might be best understood as embedded within local systems of negotiating authority. Taking this substantivist view of both economy and ritual to a consideration of Lower Nubian archaeology from the Late Meroitic period, we can understand a flourish of Meroitic-Egyptianoid burial monuments as in part a response to local power struggled during a decline in central Sudanese Meroitic authority. Concurrently alternative ritual symbols, including local developments, gained currency in Lower Nubia. The outcome of these local conflicts and re-interpretations was the transformation in Nubian culture known as the ‘X-Group’. While the conventional Pharoanic model of the Meroitic state sees the beginning of the ‘X-Group’ period due to invasions and the collapse of a state with essentially passive local communities, the Sudanic model offers a more nuanced perspective on this transformation in which local communities played an active role.

Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem

More than four decades of archaeological research in the southern Levant have shown what can only be interpreted as close and prolonged interaction between representatives of the Protodynastic culture of the Nile Valley and the indignenous inhabitants. Against a background of evidence for large scale importation of goods from Egypt, there is a somewhat surprisingly measured degree of impact the nascent unified Nilotic state exerted on the material culture of its Early Bronze I neighbors in the southern Levant. This paper focuses on evidence for Egyptian influence in some of the more mudane aspects of material culture, pottery, flint tools and domestic architecture.

Independent Scholar, American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) / Washington, DC Chapter, USA

This paper examines the artistic treatment of Old and New Testament events that occurred in Egypt: the finding of Moses, scenes from the life of Joseph, the Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, the flight into Egypt, and repose on the flight into Egypt, to name a few. Using Biblical art as its platform, it draws some compelling parallels between intellectual, religious and political climates of different historical periods.

Even though the roots of Old Testament art can be traced back to Alexandria, Egypt, its form and decoration were, in fact, Hellenistic. Before the Christian era, illustrated copies of the official translation—books of the Alexandrian Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint—formed the basis for Biblical art. Those images persisted into 11^th, 12^th, and 13^th century Byzantine art, then made their way into the landscapes of Italian painting.

Early New Testament art—though developing contemporaneously from the first century onward—was influenced largely by local variations, i.e., Alexandrian, Syrian, Ephesian, African, Italian and Gallic. Despite this ‘freedom of expression’ and break from Hellenistic strictures, Egyptian motifs were still absent from Biblical art, even in Coptic Christian art produced in Egypt.

European works continued in this non-conventional vein until the Renaissance when classical ideals were re-introduced. Despite the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt at the end of the 18^th century, the cultural infusion of Ancient Egypt into the arts was further delayed because of French intellectual orientation toward both Ancient Rome and Greece, i.e., neo-classicism. La Revolution Française brought profound and far-reaching consequences to the arts: escape from a world that had become increasingly industrialized and mechanized to exotic and natural settings like Ancient Egypt provided the impetus for the Romantic period. In the second half of the 19^th century through the works of the Orientalists Egypt took her place in art among the great ancient cultures. Old and New Testament scenes were highly embellished and rendered with historical accuracy. Biblical themes became Egypt’s Genesis.

Institute of Archaeology, University College London

Luxury stone vessels were a popular item of exchange amongst royal courts in the ancient Near East, valued for their contents of precious oils, ointments and perfumes, as well as in their own right. They acted as visible symbols of power and prestige, representing the ability of local elites to obtain exotic materials shaped by skilled craftsmen. The mechanisms by which such goods were distributed reflect political, economic and military spheres of interest, illustrated by a study of specific classes of vessel, such as Egyptian stone vessels with royal name inscriptions. These have a limited distribution outside of Egypt itself, and it may be argued that these were one of the tools by which Egyptian pharaohs were able to assert influence on their supporters and potential allies.

Warburg Institute, University of London

Of all ancient peoples, the Greeks of the Hellenistic period had probably the most extensive and fruitful encounter with Egyptian civilization. This paper seeks to survey and examine the different forms of interaction between Egyptians and Greeks at various levels of society and in diverse spheres of life.

Department of Classics, FOLSS, University of Reading

Pilgrimage, understood as a journey of more-than-routine length to a sacred place for a religious reason, is an important part of the religious practice of most cultures. The data for pilgrimage is unusually rich in Greco-Roman Egypt, particularly in the south. Most of the data is epigraphical: graffiti and other data left by pilgrims at sanctuaries, dating from the 5th century BCE to the end of the Roman period. The situation is in stark contrast to earlier stages of Egyptian civilisation, when pilgrimage is not so well attested. This data offers an opportunity unparalleled in the ancient world to explore the practice of pilgrimage as it took place over a broad time period. The paper will address the question of what modes of sacred encounter are evidenced. Major issues to be addressed are:

1) Evidence for pilgrimage; graffiti and iconography; comparison of evidence from Grecophone and Egyptophone populations; questions of definition (e.g. how can we distinguish pilgrimage from other modes of travel, as tourism and passing visits?

2) The geography of pilgrimage: at what shrines is pilgrimage attested? Where do pilgrims come from (both inside and outside Egyptian)? To what extent can we construct catchment areas on the basis of data? How do these patterns vary over time?

3) Functions of pilgrimage: What are the principal functions of pilgrimage in Greco-Roman Egypt? Specific functions would include: healing; oracle-consultation; sacred tourism; regular group pilgrimage; intellectual revelation; more general functions might include the creation of social cohesion and intellectual development

4) The Egyptian tradition: to what extent does Greco-Roman pilgrimage continue earlier Egyptian traditions of pilgrimage? what factors distinguish it from other forms of pilgrimage in the Aegean world? what specifically Egyptian attitudes to religion does pilgrimage evidence show?

5) Cases studies of well-attested pilgrimage-traditions, e.g. the Memnonion at Abydos, the statues of Memnon, the temple of Isis at Philai, the Ammonion at Siwa.

Susan Walker

Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, The British Museum

A recent comprehensive study of the much restored Nilotic mosaic from Palestrina has set out strong arguments for identifying the subject as the Choiak festival of the inundations of the Nile as celebrated under Ptolemaic royal patronage at Canopus. Unfortunately any dating evidence offered by the portraits of the royal patrons disappeared with their removal from the mosaic before it was recorded in the 1620s. Current opinion places the pavement, on grounds of its quality and by comparison with other mosaic floors from Italy, in the late second or early first century BC. Here, however, it is argued (not for the first time), that the pavement might have been commissioned during the years of civil war following Caesar's murder, when Palestrina is known to have supported Antony, and Egypt was ruled by Cleopatra VII and her son allegedly by Caesar, Ptolemy XV Caesarion.

The mosaic certainly inspired a number of less reverent Roman portrayals of life on the Nile, and Cleopatra VII was pejoratively associated in Augustan and later Roman literature with the riotous festivals celebrated at Canopus, whose name inspired the term "Kanobismos", coined by Strabo to describe licentious behaviour. A number of obscene caricatures have survived, some using images derived from the Palestrina mosaic, and all recalling the sexual excesses of Canopus; they may even have been aimed specifically at Cleopatra's memory. Some, at least, appear to have been made in Italy for Roman soldiers serving on the Rhine frontier. Produced in various media, the caricatures mostly date to the mid-to-later first century AD, during or more likely after the reigns of Antony's descendants Caligula, Claudius and Nero, a period notorious for the decadence of the imperial court.

The Palestrina mosaic, a straightforward account of a Ptolemaic Egyptian religious festival, thus became after the fall of Egypt a focus of Roman disapproval of eastern licentiousness. At a distance of two millennia, it is often difficult to recapture the spirit in which Roman images of Egypt were made, but the animus behind the wealth of surviving imagery gives a significance which is itself vulnerable to political and social change.

Department of Religious Studies, University of New Hampshire, USA

This paper examines the transformation of Egyptian priests as they appropriated the exotic stereotypes that Greco-Roman culture draped around them. Through stereotype appropriation, these priests shifted their religious roles from a normative ritual expertise within Egyptian culture to the purveyance of "magic" to outsiders - a shift reflected in the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri and their focus on erotic and revelation spells.

Centre for Archaeology and Ancient History, Monash University, Australia

The paper examines the appropriation of the ancient hieroglyphic symbol of life, the ankh, by early Egyptian Christians in its modified form as the crux ansata. The use of the crux ansata has long been attested in funerary contexts dated from the fifth century where it appears alongside other Christian symbols upon stelae, and as decoration on Coptic textiles retrieved from Christian burials. Recent discoveries at the fourth-century village of Kellis in the Dakhleh Oasis, however, have shown it to have been a significant symbol used within an ecclesiastical context from at least the beginning of the fourth century.

Institute of Archaeology, University College London

The close historical ties between ancient Egypt and its Arabian neighbours dates back to the beginnings of Egyptian culture. Arabs are well attested throughout the history of Ancient Egypt. Some served in Egyptian secular and religious institutions. When Egypt became part of the Islamic empire in the seventh century CE, Islamic/Arabic interest in ancient Egypt is evident, particularly in view of the number of Quranic and prophetic teachings on Egypt.

The links between the Arabic and Ancient Egyptian languages are well established. Yet the Arabs’ interest in deciphering Egyptian scripts is less known. Early medieval Arab scholars were keen to decipher these ancient Egyptian scripts which they encountered on the walls of the Egyptian Barabi, and on papyri and other materials. Arabic magic, like its Coptic counterpart, continued to draw on ancient Egyptian sources. Medieval Muslim Sufis and Alchemists found in the ancient Egyptian heritage, an eternal fountain of wisdom. One of the most significant conduits for this influence is the Egyptian Sufi Dhu Al-Nun Al-Misri from Ikhmim in Upper Egypt who died in the mid ninth century CE. This paper surveys some of these Arabic sources in an attempt to show the contribution made by medieval Arabic writers to the history of Egyptology.

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