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Please join us for our next event:

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2012, 3:30 PM

DR. LESLIE ANNE WARDEN, WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

"The Economy of the Old Kingdom"

The economy influences our daily lives, in everything from job creation to tax policy. The same is true in Old Kingdom Egypt (ca. 2600-2200 BC), which serves as an interesting example of how an early state met economic challenges and influenced its populace. Though the pyramids might seem to suggest that the royal house had completely dominated the country's wealth, a closer look shows us how the limitations of the royal house and the vibrancy of the private economic sphere. This talk will show what an ancient economy looked like and the diversity apparent within the Old Kingdom.

Leslie Anne Warden is an Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia University Institute of Technology and received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her research focuses on the economic history of the Old Kingdom, particularly analyzing central-provincial economic interactions using the ceramic corpus to address the topic at the provincial level where the texts shed very little light. She has done extensive archaeological fieldwork in Egypt, at sites such as Abydos, Mendes, and Kharga. Currently, she is the Head Ceramicist for the North Kharga Oasis Survey, where she supervises collection and analysis of a ceramic corpus ranging in date from the New Kingdom to the Late Roman Period.