Public Lecture: Divine Palaces, Processional Barks, and Unusual Forms of Osiris: New insights into Religious Ritual at Ramesside Abydos

Lecture Information

During the Nineteenth Dynasty, the Abydos temple of Ramesses II played a significant role in the Khoiak festival, the central event of the Thinite Nome’s religious calendar. There are many interesting and overlooked features in this temple, the first that Ramesses built independently in what was to be an extraordinarily ambitious program of those monuments known as memorial temples, or more properly, Temples of Millions of Years. This lecture, however, will concentrate mostly on temple’s western section at the back, the location of the so-called Osiris Suite. This was a group of five normal rectangular rooms symmetrically arranged around the temple’s largest chapel, which was dedicated to Osiris, the chief deity of the dead, the afterworld, and Abydene nome itself.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Ogden Goelet received his BA in German Literature and Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia University in 1982. Goelet was a Fulltime member of the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU from 1988 to 2014. He taught undergraduate courses in Egyptian History, Religion, and Cultural History, and graduate courses in Old, Middle, and New Egyptian.

Goelet retired from fulltime teaching in 2014, joining the Institute for the Studie of the Ancient World (ISAW) as a Research Associate and continued teaching Egyptian language until 2018. Now fully retired but continuing to research and publish.