Date: Saturday, January 29, 2011, 1:30pm

Presenter: Eric Wells, UCLA, Ph.D. Candidate

Chapter: Orange County, California

Location: Bowers Museum, Norma Kershaw Auditorium, 2002 N. Main, Santa Ana, California

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Description: An encore presentation of Eric's prize-wining Best Student Paper awarded at the April 2010 ARCE Meeting.

Egypt was, according to the historian Herodotus, the most religious nation of any he had seen. We might see the huge temple complexes as evidence. However, the temples were built not as places of worship, but as "mansions of the gods." In fact, the average person could not enter into the temple. Only priests were allowed into the inner sanctum to address the gods. So, how did people cope with a religious system that was closed to them? In the 18th dynasty, individuals began adopting personal strategies of approaching the divine in non-temple settings. For the first time, individuals focused on displaying internal sentiments of faith, guilt and devotion.

About the Speaker: As a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, Eric's research focuses on Egyptian religious practices among the non-elite. He is making his debut on the Southern California speakers circuit this January, before going off to Egypt to inspect more stelae for his dissertation. We look fprweard to soon being able to introduce him as Dr. Wells.