Date: Friday, December 9, 2011, 6:30 p.m.

Chapter: Washington, D.C.

Presenter: Dr. Peter Lacovara, the Carlos Museum in Atlanta

Location: Benjamin T. Rome Auditorium of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC

Lecture is free and open to the public. Please come and bring a guest.

Description: This talk centers on a rare ancient Egyptian Mummy brought back to Atlanta over ninety years ago by Emory University’s Candler School of Theology Professor, William Arthur Shelton. Before coming to Emory, he had studied with the renowned historian, James Henry Breasted who invited him on his “American Scientific Mission” to Egypt and the Middle East.

Thanks to the generosity of Atlanta businessman, John A. Manget, Shelton was able to acquire a number of important antiquities for use in teaching. The most significant of these, as it turns out, was a long overlooked mummy, which languished in an old packing crate for decades. This was not just any mummy, however, it was a rare, early example one of probably only a half dozen in existence and the only one in the New World. Recent conservation and research has reveled much about the mummy and its importance to our understating of the evolution of mummification in ancient Egypt.

About the Speaker: Dr. Peter Lacovara serves as Senior Curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum. His responsibilities span the ancient Middle East and northeast Africa, including acquisitions, exhibitions, research and publication.

Recent special exhibitions curated by Dr. Lacovara at the Michael C. Carlos Museum include: Life and Death in the Pyramid Age; Wonderful Things: The Harry Burton Photographs and the Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb; Lost Kingdoms of the Nile: Nubian Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Excavating Egypt: Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College, London (at the Albany Institute);The Collector’s Eye: Masterpieces of Egyptian Art from the Thalassic Collection, Ltd.; Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur; Jewish Life in Ancient Egypt: A Family Archive from the Nile Valley; and Ramesses I: The Search for the Lost Pharaoh.

Peter Lacovara formerly served as assistant curator in the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His archeological fieldwork has included a number of seasons of excavations at the Giza Plateau, along with work at the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, Deir el-Ballas, Abydos, Hierakonpolis and he is currently is co-directing the excavation of the Palace city of Amenhotep III at Malqata in Western Thebes with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.