Jacco Dieleman to Speak On Egyptology in Public Lecture at Institute for Advanced Study

Jacco Dieleman, Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a 2016­–17 Shelby Cullom Davis Fellow at Princeton University, will a give a public lecture, “How to Handle a Mummy: A Burial Ritual from Greco-Roman Egypt,” on Friday, April 28, which will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus. This event is sponsored by the Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study.

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, 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.

Dieleman’s research examines how Egyptian scribal culture responds to the political, economic, cultural, and linguistic challenges posed by the imposition of Hellenistic and Roman rule (fourth century B.C.E. to fourth century C.E.). Instead of describing the final centuries of Egyptian scribal activity in terms of decline and death, Dieleman’s work treats this period as an age of scribal creativity and innovation. Currently, Dieleman is working with ancient textual amulets that originated in pharaonic Egypt and spread to Israel, Phoenicia, and Greece in the first millennium B.C.E and exploring how these were used to protect against perceived dangers and encode notions of risk and fortune.

Dieleman obtained his Ph.D. from the Universitiet Leiden in 2003. Dieleman has published and edited numerous articles on Egyptology and texts of the ancient world.

The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is requested: https://www.ias.edu/events/dieleman-publiclecture. For more information on other events at the Institute, visit www.ias.edu/events.