Local Saints, National Politics, and the Power of the Past in Early Egypt

NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the scheduled start time.

In considering the complex relationships between early elites and the populations over whom they exercised authority, moments of crisis or change in complex societies provide opportunities to track political storytelling legitimating that authority, and the ways in which local populations received or resisted these programs. What stories did elites choose to emphasize in different contexts over time, and which narratives inspired broad and lasting participation? In late third to mid second millennium BC Egypt, one such political strategy centered on local saint cults: appropriating these touchstones of regional memory as instruments of central politics. In her lecture, Janet Richards will present ongoing research on uses of the past at the site of Abydos in southern Egypt, discussing also the phenomenon of saint cults cross culturally.

RSVP required to info@arceny.com

--Reception to follow

Janet Richards is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Curator for Dynastic Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Educated at Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania in anthropology and Egyptology, she specializes in ancient northeast African archaeology and history, with special emphasis on conceptual landscapes, ideologies of power and responses to political crisis, the purposes of biography, and social transformations over time as materialized in mortuary and votive contexts. Since 1995 Richards has directed the University of Michigan Abydos Middle Cemetery Project, a large-scale investigation of a mid-third to mid-second millennium BCE mortuary and cultic landscape. She has curated several exhibitions at the Kelsey Museum, most recently “Discovery! Excavating the Ancient World,” exploring current research questions and methods in archaeology. Her publications include the co-edited volume Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States (2000) and Society and Death in Ancient Egypt: mortuary landscapes of the Middle Kingdom (2005); her current project is Writing Ancient Lives: Weni the Elder and ancient Egyptian responses to political crisis.

There will be a reception folowing the event.

This is a public event.

To RSVP, please email info@arceny.com.