ARCE New England: The International Style in the Early 18th Dynasty

Lecture Information: 

While the international artistic koine in Egypt was fully matured by late 18th Dynasty, as demonstrated by the objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, it is harder to trace the earlier representations of the koine in Egyptian art. The experimentation by Egyptian craftsmen with the use of non-Egyptian motifs and iconographic themes as a “visual vocabulary” with the deliberate intention of creating a visual language for the viewers of those objects may have started as early as the Second Intermediate Period. The rapidly changing political situation at the end of the Second Intermediate Period and the start of the 18th dynasty may have fostered artistic experimentation by craftsmen as they aimed to create a new iconographic language that would allow the early 18th Dynasty pharaohs, and specifically Ahmose, the ability to navigate a rapidly changing early Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean political and diplomatic world. 

Speaker Bio:

Beth Ann Judas received her BA in Anthropology (with a concentration in Archaeology), and her MA in Classics (Archaeology) at Florida State University. She holds her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her focus at UPenn was on Egypt (Middle and New Kingdoms) and Bronze Age Greece. Beth Ann’s main research lies in the study of interconnections between Middle and New Kingdom Egypt and the Bronze Age Aegean, which resulted in her PhD dissertation, “Late Bronze Age Aegean Ceramics in the Nile Valley: An Analysis of Idea and Practice in the Archaeological Record.” She currently researches the Keftiu (Bronze Age Aegeans) in New Kingdom Egypt.