Solving the "Blue" Mystery - New Kingdom Pottery

Originally published March 17, 2010 | Washington University in St. Louis | by Diana Lutz | An excerpt:

What was she doing in the tunnel?

The answer: seeking an uncontaminated sample of a mineral that might have been the key ingredient in the blue used to decorate "blue painted pottery" popular among the Egyptian elite during the New Kingdom (1550-1079 BC).

Colleague Colin A. Hope, PhD, an expert in blue painted pottery, had asked if she wouldn’t help him pin down the source of the blue pigment by sampling and analyzing material from the mine.

Hope and Smith, together with Paul Kucera, a doctoral student at Monash University in Australia who first identified the mines, describe the pottery, the mines and the mineral in a chapter of Beyond the Horizon, a festschrift for the Egyptologist Barry A. Kemp

Notorious Forgeries Take London's Limelight

Originally published January 25, 2010 | The Daily Star | A new exhibit, called the Metropolitan Police Service’s Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened last Saturday that features ancient Egyptian fakes, including those from a man who had been in the trade for more than a dozen years and many with signed "certificates of authenticity" alongside them. The most famous of the forgeries, the Amarna Princess, is also on display. The exhibit runs until February 7.

EES 2010 Tour to Egypt

Originally published September 22, 2009 | Egypt Exploration Society

When: Saturday, March 13 - 27, 2010; Key Figures: Professor Alan Lloyd, Faten Saleh, and Ros Phipps; Contact: Emily Feasey (The Traveller) +44 (0)20 7436 9343 or email info@the-traveller.co.uk; Cost: £2635 (per person)/Single room supplement £332. The program guide offers more details and descriptions about this trip; click the link to access it.

Trip to Tell el-Amarna Organized by the Bloomsbury Summer School

Originally published September 16, 2009 | Challenging the Past | by Marsia Sfakianou Bealby

Leicestershire Ancient Egyptian Society: Lecture Programme 2009-10

Accessed August 6, 2009 | Infolinx and Challenging the Past

Starting in September, 2009 through June, 2010 at the New Walks Museum, the Leicestershire Ancient Egyptian Society offers monthly lectures with illustrations on any aspect of Ancient Egypt. Visit Infolinx for directions and contact information and stop by Challenging the Past for a fully detailed itinerary of each monthly lecutre.

Book Review - The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies

Accessed July 20, 2009 | Bryn Mawr Classical Review | by Rolf Strootman

The book under review is the result of a workshop held in 2004 in Newcastle, where seven scholars met to discuss and compare seven royal courts in different cultures and periods: the Achaemenid, Argead Macedonian, and Sassanid, early and late imperial Roman, Han Chinese and New Kingdom Egyptian.

The volume ends with a chapter by Kate Spence, who considers the court in pharaonic Egypt in the late Second Millennium BCE -- a difficult task since official royal texts rarely mention individuals other than the pharaoh: "building temples, fighting wars and performing ritual were recorded as historical events but were usually presented as if kings acted in isolation" (p. 267). Spence therefore focuses on the relatively well-documented court of the reformer Akhenaten at el-Amarna. As in most other ancient monarchies, courtiers in pharaonic Egypt doubled as administrators. Since priests played a crucial role in pharaonic administration, Spence interprets Akhenaten's abolition of the powerful priesthood of Amun -- normally considered as a religious measure -- as an effort by the king to shift the balance between himself and his officials, an active reform of the administration encountered more often in Egyptian history.