Bes-like figures in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

June 6, 2021 1PM ET/ 7PM EET

(Registration form below) 

Speaker: Dr. Rita Lucarelli  

Lecture Information:

Bes was a popular god in ancient Egypt and he still is today. Less known are instead some apotropaic Bes-like figures occurring in the vignettes of spells belonging to the corpus of the Book of the Dead, especially on papyrus, and which play the function of demonic guardians of the netherworld. In this lecture, these figures will be analyzed and discussed in order to understand their (benevolent or malevolent) agency within the heterogeneous divine and demonic population of the Realm of the Dead. 

About Rita Lucarelli:

Lucarelli studied at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy, where she received her MA degree in Classical Languages and Egyptology. She holds her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her Ph.D. thesis was published as the The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. She worked as a Research Scholar and a lecturer at the Department of Egyptology of Bonn University. She is currently an Associate Professor of Egyptology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow of the Digital Humanities in Berkeley. She is presently working at a project aiming at realizing 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the “Book of the Dead in 3D”. She is also completing a new monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled “Agents of punishment and protection: ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millenium BCE” and she is one of the coordinators of the international project “Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project”, or “Demon Things”.

Registration will close 48 hours before the lecture starts. Registration does not include any future lectures in this series.