Searching for the Missing Cities of Egypt

People often ask, ‘we know so much about Egyptian temples and tombs, but what about where people lived? What about their houses, villages, towns and cities?’

 Although temples and tombs were very visible to the earliest Egyptologists in Egypt itself,  the country’s great ancient cities were much harder to identify, and often only known from classical accounts.  

Alexandria was a disappointment to many, Memphis seemed to have disappeared, and where was Thebes? Two centuries and more dedicated Egyptological research have given us the names of countless more important settlements, and archaeology has revealed the whereabouts of some of them, but not all… Which cities are still missing, and which might still await discovery?

Join us for this set of 4 lectures where we we consider the sites known to us from historical sources and try to match them with archaeological remains on the ground.

We will start by exploring what is meant  by ‘missing’ i.e. what we knew existed, what has since been found, and what is still lost before looking in detail at some case studies. This course will  take us on a journey of elusive places as we try to follow the clues to see what remains of places such as Itj-T3wy, Bubastis, Avaris, Hermopolis, Herakleopolis and many more!