Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2011, 6:30 p.m.

Chapter: New York, NY

Speaker: Susan J. Allen, Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, Brown University.

Location:  Alston & Bird LLP, 90 Park Avenue, (between 39th and 40th Streets), 15th Floor Lecture Room (Note:  Photo ID Required to enter Building

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

R.S.V.P. REQUIRED: Please reply to info@arceny.com

A wine and hors d’oeuvres reception to follow the Lecture

Description:

People have been cruising the Nile now for more than 5000 years from the Predynastic Period to the present. The geography of the Nile Valley and river and its annual inundation have determined the development of Egyptian culture, civilization, history and economy and despite the advent of cars, trucks, trains and planes – travel by boat still remains part of everyday life. But for those of us visiting Egypt as tourists or scholars, a trip down the Nile has come to mean much more.

With the opening up of Egypt after the Napoleonic Expedition (1798-1801) and the rapid advances in transportation and communication in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Egypt became a destination for all those adventurers, artists, writers, and amateur travelers who had time, curiosity and the resources to venture down, or rather up then down, the Nile in small sailing vessels called dahabiyehs. With the invention of the package tour by Thomas Cook in the 1850’s, travel on the Nile shifted to small and large steamboats—the era of Agatha Christie and Death on the Nile. This lecture will present some the many ways people traveled, what they saw and how they recorded their trips in letters, journals, published accounts, drawings, watercolors and photographs. And surprisingly, ARCE’s link to this golden age of travel on the Nile.

Susan Allen sorting pottery

About the Speaker:Susan J. Allen is a Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies, Brown University. A graduate of the University of Chicago, she is a specialist in ancient Egyptian ceramics and has worked with a French mission in the Temple of Karnak, the NYU-IFA excavations at Mendes in the eastern Delta, and at Giza, Memphis and Amarna. Since 1993 she has participated in the Met’s current expedition to the Pyramid Complex of Senwosret III at Dahshur where she is responsible for the study and documentation of the ancient pottery recovered and the preparation of this material for publication. In 2007 she curated the exhibition “Discovering Tutankhamun: the Photographs of Harry Burton” at the Museum and is the author of the accompanying book, Tutankhamun’s Tomb: The Thrill of Discovery (MMA/Yale University Press, 2006).

From 1978-1982 she lived in Cairo and during this time she had a unique opportunity—to live on a 1920’s vintage Thomas Cook tourist steamer on the Nile. As a result she became interested in the modern discovery of Egypt and the history of travel there and began to collect old travel accounts, guidebooks, photos, postcards and other ephemera from the 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also a member of the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East.