Creativity and Innovation in Non-royal Tombs of the Old Kingdom: The Mastaba of Akhmeretnisut at Giza

Bio: Inês Torres is a Ph.D. Candidate in Egyptology at Harvard University and a Research Associate at the American Research Center in Egypt for the academic year of 2019-2020. She received a B.A. in Archaeology from the University of Lisbon in 2012, and an M.Phil. in Egyptology from the University of Oxford in 2014. Inês is also the Teaching Fellow Instructor for Egyptian AA and AB: Introduction to Egyptian Hieroglyphs and a Graduate Student Intern in the Harvard Art Museums for the 2019-2020 academic year. Her research aims to reassess the role Giza played as a non-royal burial site in the Late Old Kingdom and rethink current theories and assumptions related to the characteristics of the private funerary complexes built during that period. 

Info about Lecture: This lecture will present the most recent research conducted on the mastaba of Akhmeretnisut and discuss the importance of this tomb for the understanding of private funerary monuments of the Old Kingdom. The decorative program of this mastaba is unparalleled in several ways: not only does it contain scenes unattested elsewhere, the spatial arrangement of the decoration is very unusual. Therefore, the mastaba of Akhmeretnisut is an excellent example of how the rules of decorum could be bent by the tomb owner to express creativity and display innovations in both iconography and architecture.