ARCE-PA Celebrates 15 Years!
2005-2020
Welcome to the American Research Center in Egypt, Pennsylvania Chapter website. Here you can find information about the organization, learn about our membership options, find out about upcoming Egypt-themed events and more! To visit the American Research Center in Egypt National website please click here.
2022 FALL LECTURES
Saturday, November 12, 2022
3:30pm
Classroom L1
Abstract:
The "Teaching of Amenemhat” is the only work of ancient Egyptian literature to depict the murder of a king. Narrated by the assassinated pharaoh Amenemhat I, the poem is unique in both its dark subject matter and its great popularity among ancient readers in Egypt and Nubia. Much of the previous scholarship on “Amenemhat” has focused on the poem’s composition and relationship to the politics of the 12th Dynasty. This lecture, in contrast, shifts the focus from the birth of the poem to its afterlife, investigating who was reading “Amenemhat,” how they interpreted the poem, and how interpretations changed over the approximately 1000 years of the poem’s circulation. Combining textual criticism, reception theory, and material philology, I examine a selection of the poem’s surviving manuscripts, investigating the contexts in which they were copied and read, as well as their varying versions of the text. My analyses of these manuscripts reveal that this enigmatic poem had a diverse array of ancient readers, from a treasury scribe in the capital, to a student visiting the crumbling pyramid of the long-dead Amenemhat I, to a Kushite king hundreds of miles away in Nubia. I argue that these readers’ unique encounters with “The Teaching of Amenemhat” reveal important shifts in what readers valued about the poem and how they interpreted it over the course of its long afterlife.
Bio:
Dr. Margaret Geoga is an Egyptologist specializing in the transmission and reception of ancient Egyptian literature. She is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Wolf Humanities Center of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in Egyptology in 2020 and a concurrent MA in Comparative Literature in 2018, both from Brown University. She is currently preparing a monograph on the transmission and reception history of “The Teaching of Amenemhat” from ca. 1550 to 500 BCE. Maggie’s interest in reception studies also extends beyond antiquity. An ongoing project centers on Jean Terrasson’s 1731 novel Séthos, whose depiction of Egypt strongly influenced numerous eighteenth-century authors, artists, and thinkers—from Warburton to Cagliostro to Mozart—and still underlies many contemporary beliefs about ancient Egypt.
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 be accepting entry fees via Paypal for In-Person Lectures.
Please visit the Penn Museum website to plan your visit:
https://www.penn.museum/If you are interested in joining ARCE or need to renew your membership*, please visit:
https://www.arce.org/membership
LECTURES WINTER 2023:
IN-PERSON LECTURES FOR FALL 2022/WINTER 2023
*ARCE-PA does not hold lectures in January*
Saturday December 17, 2022
3:30pm
Virtual Lecture
*Zoom registration required*
Dr. Caroline Arbuckle
St. Thomas Moore College, Univ. of Saskatchewan
A Tale of Four Coffins: Exploring Egypt's History through Wooden Coffin Analysis
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Saturday February 18
3:30pm
Virtual Lecture
*Zoom registration required*
Dr. Sarah Schellinger
Ohio State University
"Nubia and its Neighbors: Non-Kushite Elements on Napatan and Meroitic Architecture"
