The Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) programme offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

Leiden University commemorates its victims of the war and pays tribute to all members of the university community who resisted injustice.

Our library contains around 23,000 books, journals and historical documents under the care of a specialized librarian.

This research project is supported by an NWO Aspasia grant, DeepDish TV, crowd-sourced funding, and the Democracy and Media Foundation.

LUCAS members are experts in the fields of literary history and theory, film and media studies, and art, architectural, and book history.

The fourth conference of Isis Studies was organised by Liège college and has now been published by Laurent Bricault and Miguel John Versluys.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations programme offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations programme in Egyptology offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations programme offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) programme in Egyptology offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

Update : March 2020 Directors: Dr. Lara Weiss and Dr. Christian Greco Deputy directors: Dr. Daniel Soliman and Dr. Paolo Del Vesco

The MA Classics and Ancient Civilizations at Leiden University covers the entire range of present-day research on the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, Greece and the Roman Empire. In chronological terms, the program covers thousands of years, from the early origins…

Systematic investigations into religious precepts, worldly rules of law and legal practices in the Muslim world show clearly how these societies deal with justice and injustice. Sharia, the Islamic ‘legal system’, plays an important role in this context.

LIAS has a School of Asian Studies (SAS), a School of Middle-Eastern Studies (SMES) and a School of Religious Studies (LUCSoR). These designations, and the fields within them, remain foundational to our work. At the same time, the academic community benefits from the presence of cross-regional networks…

Master

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) programme in Assyriology offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) programme in Classics offers many extracurricular opportunities to enrich your study experience.

Leiden University provides ambitious students with the most recent and innovative areas of knowledge, and offers them the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Our institutes abroad are instrumental for Leiden’s internationalisation activities.

Our institutes abroad are instrumental for Leiden’s internationalisation activities.

Mission Director: Dr. Carina van den Hoven (The Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden University)

NOSTER, the research school for Theology and Religious Studies, organizes a Coptic Course in the fall of 2023. Students can enroll until October 1.

NVIC suffered a great loss by the passing of Dirk Huyge, curator of Prehistoric and Early Dynastic Egypt at the Art & History Museum, Brussels. Dirk Huyge will always be remembered for his role in establishing a systematic approach for rock art research in Egypt. May all the beautiful memories be…

I’m Laurence Peelen and I am the new intern at the NVIC. I just finished my BA Islam Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen and I wanted to gain some more experience in the MENA region at the start of my Master’s program.

Dr. Miguel John Versluys was awarded the Zenobia Essay Prize during the recent conference Troy: the city, the war, the legend organized by the Zenobia Foundation in the Lutheran church in Amsterdam.

Sarah is the latest addition to our team...

Cisca Hoogendijk received an NWO Internationalisation in the Humanities Grant for the project 'Text in Context: Recontextualising the papyri from Roman Soknopaiou Nesos / Dime (Fayyum, Egypt)'.

Studying one another’s languages and cultures fosters understanding between groups of people, which leads to more equality, along with increased economic, administrative, and cultural cooperation.

We are very happy to announce that as of 1 March Marleen De Meyer is our new NVIC Director!

Dr Amany Soliman joined the NVIC as a postdoctoral research fellow in October 2017. She is a lecturer of modern history and international relations at the Mediterranean Studies Institute at the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University. For her PhD thesis, she examined the nationalist movements in Spain,…

Our MA student Marie Costers from the University of Antwerp wrote about her experiences as a student at NVIC in Spring 2025!

Arriving at a new workplace has never been as easy as it was in the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo. I’m very grateful for the nice colleagues who helped me in the first few days to settle down in Egypt and start to work in the office. Although I spent the last 3 years on site as a field archaeologist…

NVIC is delighted to host Dr. Younous Arbaoui from the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law of the VU University Amsterdam as our NWIB Visiting Professor during three months this Spring.

We are delighted to welcome Elisabeth Faber as our new intern for the Fall semester 2022.

Considering the ongoing developments surrounding Covid-19 in Egypt and in accordance with Leiden University regulations, we have decided to cancel the Dutch courses for the time being. We will reevaluate the situation in December 2021 the soonest.

Dear all,

Dear friends of the institute,

Luca Bruls is currently doing an internship at NVIC. Besides that she works on an ethnographic account of the museum of Islamic art in Cairo. Read more…

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral fellowship for up to 6 months, connected to the ERC- funded research project Rethinking Disability at Leiden University, in cooperation with the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo.

A flake of limestone (ostracon) inscribed with an ancient Egyptian word list of the fifteenth century BC turns out to be the world’s oldest known abecedary. The words have been arranged according to their initial sounds, and the order followed here is one that is still known today. This discovery has…

NVIC welcomes Ahmed Hassan, a PhD candidate at Indiana University as a guest researcher.

Dear friends of the NVIC

The Leiden Papyrological Institute celebrated its eightieth birthday on Monday 19 January. Its collection of papyri – including paper, potsherds, pieces of wood and even lead – covers the period from 300 B.C. until after 800 A.D. and is entirely of Egyptian origin. The institute’s anniversary is being…

Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

The project seeks to come to an understanding of the archaeology of the desert and the ways in which its inhabitants engaged with their constraint, marginal environments through time. It compares and interprets site distribution and community organisation over a long time scale and across several different…