Date: Thursday, May 18, 2011, 7:30pm

Chapter: Portland, Oregon

Presenter: Marleen De Meyer, Postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders and Co-Field Director of the excavations of Leuven University at Dayr al-Barsha in Middle Egypt

Location: Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 298, Portland State University

Free admission and open to the public. Free parking in PSU parking structures after 7:00 p.m.

Description: Since 2002 the University of Leuven (Belgium) has been conducting excavations at the site of Dayr al-Barsha in Middle Egypt. This place was used as a necropolis by the inhabitants of the nearby provincial capital Hermopolis throughout most of ancient Egyptian history.

Dayr al-Barsha is most famous for its Middle Kingdom nomarchs’ tombs, including the well-preserved tomb of governor Djehutihotep, but the site also contains a large Old Kingdom rock necropolis. The limestone cliffs are honeycombed with hundreds of small Old Kingdom tombs, some of which preserve traces of decoration. In several of these tombs, a restoration inscription dating to the late First Intermediate Period was carved. What this restoration consisted of became clear when the intact burial of Henu was found, an administrator serving under a governor named Djehutinakht at the end of the First Intermediate Period. This burial contained not only the perfectly preserved coffin and mummy of the deceased, but also a number of wooden tomb models portraying scenes of daily life in Ancient Egypt.

About the Speaker: Marleen De Meyer is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders and co-field director of the excavations of Leuven University at Dayr al-Barsha in Middle Egypt. She investigates provincial administration in the 15th and 16th Upper Egyptian nomes based on a number of necropoleis dating from the late Old Kingdom to the First Intermediate Period. Part of this postdoctoral fellowship she spends as a visiting research scholar at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her PhD from Leuven University in Belgium in 2008, with a dissertation about the rock tombs of the late Old Kingdom at that site, where she has been excavating since 2002.

Prior to her work at Dayr al-Barsha, she spent several seasons in Egypt between 1997 and 2001, copying reliefs in the Roman period temple of Shenhur, some 20 km north of Luxor. This resulted in the publication of the inscriptions of the interior of the temple that appeared in 2003. In 2010 a final field campaign to this temple was undertaken to finish the recording of the inscriptions, and the publication of the outer walls of this temple is underway.