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.
Voices from the New Kingdom: Non royal autobiographies.
With Associate Professor Elizabeth Frood
4 lectures delivered over 2 afternoons. Sunday 16th and 23rd March 2025
1.30 - 5.30 pm 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 23rd April.
In many ways, all our lives are stories. But very few of us would tell them quite like this! Some elite men, and very occasionally elite women, of the New Kingdom (ca 1539-1075 BC), chose to monumentalize aspects of their lives and selves, creating something like a life story, in tombs and temples as part of extravagant displays of status and prestige. Such autobiographical texts had been composed since the mid-third millennium BC, so this was an ancient genre by the time we get to the New Kingdom. Imagine you are writing your own autobiography and the models you are expected to follow come from the time of, for example, Chaucer or Shakespeare . In this course, we will explore a range of autobiographical texts by focusing on their contexts, from individual objects (especially statues), to richly decorated tombs, to whole sacred landscapes. We will examine the decisions people made (or that were made for them), and the possibilities for self-fashioning available to them, including those individuals who crafted something new, perhaps even radical and shocking.
Join us for this set of four lectures delivered over two afternoons as we explore the stories of people’s lives, as developed and displayed through various monuments and landscapes.
Sunday 16th March
- Writing Selves in Stone: an overview of autobiography and its development.
- Temple Lives: priestly self-presentation in temples and sacred landscapes.
3.Defying Conventions: exploring possible experimentations with the genre.
- A Woman’s Place: how can women speak, or be spoken for?
Associate Professor Elizabeth Frood
Liz Frood is Associate Professor of Egyptology in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, and Honorary Fellow of The Queen’s College. Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, she received her first degrees from the University of Auckland-Waipapa Taumata Rau and her doctorate from the University of Oxford. She writes on many aspects of nonroyal self-presentation and display, particularly for the late New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. Elizabeth codirects (with Chiara Salvador, Montpellier) the Karnak Graffiti Project in collaboration with the Centre Franco-Égyptien d’Étude des Temples de Karnak. She is the author of Biographical texts from Ramessid Egypt (2007), articles on topics ranging from potters to religion, and co-editor of Ancient Egyptian Biographies: contexts, forms, functions (2020).
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