ARCE NY: Excavating the City of the Snake Goddess: Flinders Petrie at Tel Nabasha

Lecture Information: 

In the early months of 1886, Flinders Petrie arrived in the eastern Nile Delta at an out-of-the-way site south of Tanis known as Tell Fara’un or Tell Nabasha (ancient Imet). Petrie and his assistant Francis Griffith worked at the site for several months uncovering a vast temple complex dedicated to the goddess Wadjet, a cemetery spanning the New Kingdom to the early Medieval Period, and the remains of a Late Period settlement. The speaker has worked on Petrie’s excavated material from Tell Nabasha since 2014, as well as conducting excavations at Tell Nabasha in 2015 and a remote sensing survey in 2016. Using this research, along with archival material pertaining to Petrie’s work at the site, this talk will explore what Petrie found in 1886 and how these finds can help us reconstruct the chronology, development, and function of the ancient city of Imet, the cult center of the snake goddess. 

Speaker Bio: 

Dr. Nicky Nielsen is a Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Manchester. He specializes in New Kingdom and Late Period material culture as well as settlement archaeology. He has excavated at various sites in Egypt as well as Turkey and the UK. He is the author of Egytomaniacs: How We Became Obsessed with Ancient Egypt. He also researches effective distance learning techniques and has co-published From Mummies to Microchips, a handbook about effective distance learning strategies in the humanities together with Professor Joyce Tyldesley.