07

Sep

ARCE Chicago x ISAC: Colorful and Rare: Third Intermediate Period Coffins from Akhmim

Registration is Required

Presented by: Dr. Kea Johnston - Joint Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum

  • 5:00 PM CTARCE Chicago
  • Hybrid - In Person / Zoom via button belowLaSalle Banks Room ISAC, The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago, 1155 E. 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637
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Lecture Information

Coffin of Fayt-aat (Field Museum 31840). Photo courtesy of Kea Johnston.

With the fall of the New Kingdom, the Egyptian political system fragmented. As happened in the First and Second Intermediate Periods, the dissolution of a courtly artistic tradition cleared the way for new and innovative regional traditions.

Though Third Intermediate Period funerary art is best known from Theban pieces like the cartonnage of Meresamun at the ISAC (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures) Museum, different regions produced different styles. One such style that has often gone unnoticed comes from the city of Akhmim, some 200 km north of Thebes.

During the Third Intermediate Period, artists at Akhmim produced coffins that were distinct and visually stunning. This talk will discuss what makes the coffins and cartonnages from Akhmim in the Third Intermediate Period distinctive and why they often go unrecognized.

It also raises questions of why a local tradition may have existed at Akhmim, in the proverbial backyard of the High Priests of Amun, challenging the dominant narrative about Egyptian politics at the time.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Kea Johnston got her PhD in Egyptology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. Her dissertation, entitled “Unseen Hands: Coffin Production at Akhmim From Dynasty 21 to 30″ dealt with identifying workshop groupings among the large corpus of unprovenienced objects that were unscientifically excavated at Akhmim in the 1880s. She is working on problems of digital imaging as joint postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for the study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. She is currently authoring a book based on her PhD thesis and has published several papers dealing with scribal practice in funerary art during the first millennium BCE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About ARCE-Chicago:

The American Research Center in Egypt/ Chicago (Illinois) chapter was founded in 2006. The Chicago chapter serves members in Illinois and beyond, and is among the largest and most active of any of the local chapters.