ARCE Northern CA: Painting Coffins at Akhmim in the First Millennium BCE

Non-members must register no later than noon Saturday, October 8th. 

Lecture Information

After the New Kingdom, wealthy Egyptians were sent to their afterlives in dazzling decorated and inscribed coffins which were nested like Russian dolls. Our understanding of these vessels for rebirth centers on the city of Thebes, and focuses on dating the coffins through changes in their layout. Local traditions have long been neglected and assumed to be derivative of the Theban tradition; the work of artists and scribes outside of Thebes is often dismissed as “naive” or “provincial” though in reality, we know very little about the workshops that produced coffins, or the training of the artists and scribes who worked in them. 

Speaker Bio

Dr. Kea M. Johnston graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in Egyptology in 2022. Her PhD thesis deals with workshops that produced coffins at the Egyptian site of Akhmim in the period between 1100 and 330 BCE. She is interested in both the content and materiality of textual inscription on coffins, and Egyptian funerary art generally.