Public Lecture: How to Handle a Mummy: A Burial Ritual from Greco-Roman Egypt

The so-called Artemis Liturgical Papyrus preserves the instructions and incantations for the burial of a woman named Artemis. Artemis was buried in Egypt in the late Hellenistic or early Roman period. Despite her Greek name, she was buried in Egyptian style, mummified and all. In this public lecture, Jacco Dieleman, Member (2016) in the School of Historical Studies, will first reconstitute the manuscript from the preserved fragments and then reconstruct the ritual proceedings. This exercise will reveal that the ritual is a creative reworking of incantations that were already centuries or even millennia old by the time the manuscript was inscribed. It offers us the opportunity to study how Egyptian scribes dealt with their cultural heritage at a time when Egyptian society was undergoing rapid social and cultural change.

This lecture is sponsored by the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study.