Date: Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 7:00pm

Chapter: ARCE Northwest (Seattle)

Presenter: Thomas Schneider; professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies, University of British Columbia

Location: University of Washington

Admission is free and open to the public.

Description: The history of Egyptology in the Third Reich has never been the subject of academic analysis. Shortly after World War II, Georg Steindorff, who had fled the Nazis, wrote a letter to his University of Chicago colleague John Wilson incriminating some former colleagues in Germany and exonerating others. This lecture draws on new research in Germany to set Steindorff’s remarkable letter in context. How did Nazis justify the study of the “non-Aryan” civilization of ancient Egypt, and what were the implications of their beliefs and policies for the discipline in Germany and at the German Archaeological Institute in Egypt, which Hermann Junker directed?

About the Speaker: Thomas Schneider is Professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia. He studied Egyptology at Zurich, Basel, and Paris and took his PhD from the University of Basel in 1990. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Egyptian History, Near Eastern Archaeology and of the series Culture and History of the Ancient Near East.