Ian Mathieson Memorial Lecture
Online Event
This talk will introduce a scribe/painter who lived in the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina, whose inhabitants created the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. By studying the individual hieroglyphs in the superbly decorated underground chambers of the Chief Workman Anhurkhawy (TT 359), it is possible to see how variable the shapes of Nebnefer’s signs could be according to where in the tomb he was painting and what texts he was writing; how some of his hieroglyphs show unusual creativity; what spelling mistakes he could make and how he corrected them; and how his hieroglyphs show that he possessed a knowledge of the hieratic as well as the hieroglyphic script. Interestingly he may also have manipulated the format of the texts for his own purposes as a means of self-presentation within this funerary monument of the Chief Workman.
So by studying in detail his handwriting style, it is possible to contemplate behaviour patterns and conscious thought-processes made by a painter of hieroglyphs who lived in pharaonic Egypt over 3000 years ago.
Dr Elizabeth Bettles followed a degree in Egyptology and Coptic at Liverpool University. In 1989 she joined theOxford Expedition to Egypt team as their epigrapher drawing facsimiles of reliefs in Old Kingdommastabas at Saqqara in the tomb of the vizier Kagemni. Since that year she has hardly missed aseason working archaeologically in Egypt. In 1994, while doing an MA at University College London, she joined Ian Mathieson’s team as site supervisor for his ground-penetrating survey work at Saqqara, which continued for several seasons around the Gisr el-Mudir and remains of Late Period temples. She has been a member of the British Museum team in the Dongola region of the Sudan working as a surveyor. She has studied ceramics for several teams, working with the EES team at Saqqara, the German Institute at Buto, and Berkeley University at Tell Muqdam in the Delta and Tell el-Hiba in Middle Egypt. After her PhD at UCL, she returned to her epigraphic work recording wall-paintings in a Roman-period mammisi in the Dakhleh oasis, with a Dutch team from Leiden University. From 2018 she has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Leiden University with a project which characterises and identifies different hieroglyphic handwriting styles in texts painted in the royal workmen’s tombs at Deir el-Medina at Luxor.
Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members