Hopkins Expert to Share Ancient Egyptian View On a Happy Afterlife: You Can Take It With You

CHESTERTOWN, MD—A Johns Hopkins University expert in the history and art of ancient Egypt will visit Washington College on Tuesday, October 4, to deliver a lecture titled “Preparing for the Afterlife: What to Bring and Why.” The talk complements the current exhibition of ancient funerary objects now on display at the Kohl Gallery, “Now and Forever: Funerary Artifacts from Ancient Egypt.”

Sponsored by the Kohl Gallery and the Department of Art and Art History, the talk by Dr. Betsy M. Bryan, will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. The Kohl Gallery exhibition features more than 30 rare items, many of them statuettes of animals or gods and goddesses, that date from the 3rd century CE to the 3rd millennium BCE. Many of the items have never before been shown to the public. The Gallery, which is not normally open on Tuesdays, will offer special hours before and after the talk: from 3:30 to 4:30, and from about 6 to 7 p.m.

Dr. Bryan is the Alexander Badawy Professor of Egyptian Art and Archaeology in Hopkins’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, where she has taught since 1986. Her research interests include the organization and techniques of art production, as well as the religious and cultural significance of tomb and temple decoration. As part of her research she has studied the unfinished elite painted tomb of the royal butler Suemniwet, ca. 1420 B.C. and is publishing it as a study in painting and its social meaning in the mid-18th Dynasty. Her current fieldwork is in the temple complex of the goddess Mut at South Karnak and its temple of Mut of Isheru.

For more information: http://www.washcoll.edu

Photos: Top, Dr. Betsy Bryan, right, with a student at the excavation site for the temple of goddess Mut, and one view of restoration work in progress there.