American Research Center in Egypt

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2026 SPRING LECTURES

Saturday,  February 21, 2026

FREE Lecture, On Zoom

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Dr. Henning Franzmeier

Senior Research Associate, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia

Piramesse: 

From the City of Wonders to Terra Incognita

 

 Where today just a typical Egyptian village is located, surrounded by fertile, green fields, 3300 years ago, Ramesses II founded his capital Piramesse. In contrast to Akhenaton’s Akhetaton, Piramesse was not founded at a virgin site but instead Ramesses II chose a site with a lot of tradition to which he could connect. During his long reign, the city became the one of the largest settlements not only of Egypt but the whole koiné spanning the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. Texts portray Piramesse as a place where food is abundant, where temples and colossal statues were erected, and where the king would receive the envoys bringing the silver tablet with the famous peace treaty with the Hittite Empire. A few years later, the king received his Hittite wife after the god Seth had made winter become summer so that the long journey could be finished safely. Moreover, it was a military headquarters and center of trade between Egypt and the outside world. When entering Egypt, Piramesse was the first city the traveler would have seen, serving as a showcase and a stage of pharaoh's power. 

But what does remain of the city and what can we say after nearly a century of excavations? And what happened so that the memory of Piramesse only survived via its mention in the bible as Ramses, while the location remained disputed and was only identified by Mahmoud Hamza in 1930?

This lecture will tell the biography of Piramesse from its beginnings before Ramesses II through its heydays in the 19th Dynasty until its decline when it finally vanished almost completely from the surface after the end of the New Kingdom. Using the results of the excavations since 1928, the major features of the city will be shown and finds will be used to illustrate the long and rich history of the city.

Dr. Henning Franzmeier has been working at Qantir-Piramesse for the past 20 years and directed the excavations since 2015. Over the past ten years, he has taught at UCL Qatar in Doha, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Bologna, and also worked for the Humboldt-University in Berlin and The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia.

In 2014, he received his PhD from the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on the New Kingdom cemeteries at the Middle Egyptian site of Sedment – a reassessment of the 1920/21 excavations of William Matthew Flinders Petrie. His MA thesis at the University of Göttingen dealt with a well of Ramesses II at Samana near Qantir-Piramesse.

His interests range from settlement archaeology to the history of Egyptology and the analysis of funerary assemblages.

 

 

SPRING 2026

Please keep an eye on your email boxes as we make arrangements for our Spring Lectures!

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February 21, 3:30 pm EST
On Zoom

REGISTER

Dr. Henning Franzmeier, Senior Research Associate,
The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia

Piramesse: From the City of Wonders to Terra Incognita

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2026 ANNUAL KORSYN LECTURE
March 7, 3:30 pm EST
Penn Museum, Classroom L2

Prof. Rita Lucarelli, Associate Professor of Egyptology,
Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley

Re-Encountering Egypt:
Museums and the Human Experience in the Age of AI

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April TBD

Penn Museum
Speaker and Topic TBD

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May 16, 3:30 pm EST

Penn Museum, Anthro Classroom 345

Prof. Josef Wegner, Curator Penn Museum, Professor of Egyptian Archaeology, Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of Pennsylvania

New Discoveries in the Anubis-Mountain Royal Necropolis at Abydos 

 

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General Lecture Info for In-Person ARCE-PA Lecture Events:

All lectures are FREE for ARCE-PA members and ARCE Members.



 
Entrance fees for ARCE-PA In-Person Lectures are:

$10 for the general public
$7 for Penn Museum members/Penn Staff/Penn Faculty
$5 for Students with ID
FREE for ARCE-PA Members, ARCE Members, & children under 12, unless otherwise stated.
 
All ARCE-PA entry fees will be taken at the door only of the lecture venue at the ARCE-PA table. 

 

We will not accept entry fees via Paypal for In-Person Lectures.
 
Light refreshments will be served starting at 3 pm.


 
Per the Penn Museum COVID-19 protocols, masks are optional.

If you are interested in joining ARCE or need to renew your membership*, please visit: 

https://www.arce.org/membership

*Please do not forget to associate with the "Pennsylvania Chapter" in order to stay up to date with ARCE-PA events.