Lecture | LIAS Lunch Talk Series
Dutch Excavations in the Eastern Nile Delta
- Date
- Wednesday 6 March 2024
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS Lunch Talk Series
- Address
-
Matthias de Vrieshof
Matthias de Vrieshof 1-4
2311 BZ Leiden - Room
- Vrieshof 3 / 1.04 (Verbarium)
Abstract
On the periphery of the Egyptian empire, the Eastern Nile Delta presents a fruitful case study to explore borderland dynamics at the cross roads of different cultures. Throughout the ages the Eastern Nile Delta has witnessed an influence from the Near East and the Levant. With long-term excavations at the site of Tell el-Dab’a, ancient Avaris and capital of the Hyksos rulers, daily life in this environment can be explored for the second millennium BC. As Delta excavations are of a completely different nature than in the Nile Valley and much more difficult to set up, comparisons with other sites are sparse and large parts of the Delta are yet unexplored. This talk will introduce the audience to this unique landscape and discuss the circumstances of archaeological work. It will furthermore explore Dutch archaeological activities in this area from the past and present plans for future excavations endeavors at Tell Ibrahim Awad. With this new project the period of the third millennium BC will be further elucidated in order to explore the long-term developments in this region from the period of state formation and unification of the Delta and Nile Valley to becoming the center of power with the location of several capitals.
About the speaker
Miriam Müller is a university lecturer in Egyptian archaeology, art and material culture at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies and especially interested in the spatial organization of domestic architecture in the pharaonic period and its social implications. She is working on aspects of the formation of identity at the household level, in particular through ancestor cults, and with a focus on the borderlands of the Egyptian empire. Here she explores the mixing and mingling of different cultures on the periphery of the Egyptian state.
Miriam received her PhD from the University of Vienna where she worked on the material from the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s excavations in Tell el-Dab'a in the Eastern Nile Delta. On the basis of the documentation and finds of a residential area she explored the field of household archaeology and its benefits for Egyptian archaeology. Miriam is the editor of the conference proceedings “Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches”. Her research on a neighborhood of the ancient city of Avaris was published as a volume of the Tell el-Dabca excavation series in 2023.
Within her research Miriam has worked on settlements from different time periods, from core and periphery of the Egyptian empire. She has participated in excavations in Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Austria and Germany and is the co-director of the Material Culture field school at Saqqara (together with Sarah Schrader/Archaeology).
Prior to her appointment at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Miriam was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. In September 2024 she will become the new director of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO).