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.
The Offspring of Ra: Sun Temples and Solar
Religion in Fifth Dynasty Egypt
With Dr Massimiliano Nuzzolo
The Offspring of Ra: Sun Temples and Solar Religion in Fifth Dynasty Egypt
4 lectures delivered over 2 afternoons. Sunday 15th and 29th September 2024
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 29th October
The cult of the sun is one of the basic features of Egyptian civilization throughout its long history. Common opinion has that the cult was originally associated with the construction of the pyramids, first and foremost, the giant pyramids of Giza. But there is a specific period of the Egyptian history when this cult was set out as a coherent religious thought, with the creation of a full-framed theology of the afterlife, the introduction of new deities, and related festivals, and the construction of unparalleled monuments for the joint cult of the king and the sun god, i.e. the sun temples. This period is the Fifth Dynasty, mid-Third Millennium BCE.
This course intends to provide the tools for the understanding of the main coordinates of this pivotal part of Egyptian history, moving through textual and literary records, artistic and architectural data and eventually bringing the attendees “into the field”, by means of the presentation of the wide archaeological documentation coming from the lecturer’s fieldwork, conducted over the past 15 years in the sun temple of Niuserra in Abu Ghurab, the only still preserved sun temple.
Recommended readings.
- Nuzzolo, The Fifth Dynasty Sun Temples. Kingship, Architecture and Religion in Third Millennium BC Egypt, Prague 2018
- Quirke, The Cult of Ra. Sun-Worship in Ancient Egypt, London 2001.
- Verner, Sons of the Sun. Rise and Decline of the Fifth Dynasty, Prague 2014.
COURSE SCHEDULE
Sunday September 15
Lecture 1: The solar cult in Third Millennium BC Egypt: main coordinates of a long history
Lecture 2: The sun temple of Niuserra, Part 1: archaeology of a living monument.
Sunday September 29
Lecture 3: The sun temple of Niuserra, Part 2: ancient festivals and rituals in context.
Lecture 4: Heliopolis, Ra and Osiris: solar religion and funerary cult
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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