Certificate of Completion
At the end of this course you will be able to download a personalised certificate of completion from the classroom. A great way to keep track of your learning and celebrate your Egyptological journey.
Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt - writing history in the land of the pharaohs
with Dr Massimiliano Nuzzolo
Four lectures delivered over 2 afternoons.
Sunday 19th and 26th January 2025
2pm UK time
We love to see you for the live lectures, but if you have to miss one, don't worry, you can of course catch up (or watch again) at your leisure via the recordings. You will have access to the recorded lectures for a whole month after the last live lecture. Recordings will be available until 26th February.
Ancient Egyptian civilization is blessed with the abundance of written textual sources which are an extremely useful means for the reconstruction of pharaonic history. Beginning with the development of early forms of the Egyptian State in the IV Millennium BCE, the proto-kings of the Nile Valley decided to leave their memories written down on diverse media such as ritual objects in temples or tombs, royal statues and architectural monuments. Starting with the Old Kingdom, the amount of information available to us increased dramatically, up to the point that the kings of the Fifth Dynasty decided to create the first example of annals for the recording of their history: the Palermo Stone. The phenomenon eventually exploded in the Ramesside period, when up to three main royal lists or annals are known to us: the Abydos List, the Saqqara List and the Royal Canon of Turin. But can we consider these annals real – and reliable – historical documents? How did ancient Egyptians cope with their past, and what was, if any, their sense of history? And how their perception of time and space evolved throughout the centuries?
By analyzing all the main textual-historical sources mentioned above and comparing them with the primary archaeological sources, this course intends to provide a framework for the understanding of this pivotal aspect of ancient Egyptian civilization, at the same time showing how complex and developed was the sense of history in ancient Egypt already long before the Ptolemaic priest Manetho wrote the most famous account of the pharaonic history, the so-called ‘Aegyptiaca’.
Last but not least, the course wishes to present the main results of the ‘Palermo Stone Project’, that has recently attempted a complete reassessment of the oldest royal annals known to us, i.e. the Palermo Stone and its associated fragments. This project, which has involved the use of the latest technologies in terms of digital photography and a mix of non-invasive geo-chemical analyses, has further demonstrated that the investigation on ancient Egyptian royal annals is far from concluded.
Sunday 12th January
Lecture 1: Writing history in ancient Egypt: how, where and why.
Lecture 2: The Palermo Stone and its associated Fragments: the oldest royal annals in context.
Sunday 26th January
Lecture 3: From darkness to light: new technologies of investigation of the Palermo Stone and its associated Fragments.
Lecture 4: From Annals to King-Lists to Histories: what Egyptian history can teach us?
(King list image below with thanks to Sandy Esene)
Dr Massimiliano Nuzzolo
Massimiliano Nuzzolo is Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Turin, Italy. He got his PhD in 2010 at L’Orientale University of Naples, Italy, with a thesis on the sun temples of the fifth dynasty and the royal ideology of the Old Kingdom. Later he became Scientific Member of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo (IFAO) where he conducted a research project on the spatial distribution of Old Kingdom tombs in the Memphite area. In 2016 he became Research Associate at the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Charles University Prague, where he was the director of the research project “Rise and development of the solar cult in ancient Egypt”. In 2020 he became Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw where he also got the direction of the “Sun Temples Project”, an interdisciplinary research project on the evolution of the sacred landscape in the Fifth Dynasty site of Abu Ghurab. In this site he is conducting field-works and excavations since 2010, as director of the Italian archeological expedition at the sun temple of Niuserra. His research interests include all subjects related to Third Millennium BC Egypt, in particular the solar cult and religion and its relationship with the development of royal ideology, but also the formation of social complexity and the related state organization in the same time span. More recently he has focused his attention on the study and re-evaluation of the Old Kingdom royal annals, the so-called “Palermo Stone”, the most important written source for the knowledge of ancient Egyptian history.
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