Monumental Ritual Texts in Ancient Egyptian Pyramids
Date and Time
Free Hybrid Lecture Event
Location: Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Speaker: Christelle Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Egyptology, Brown University
The earliest large-scale records of ancient Egyptian religious literature come from Saqqara, an important royal cemetery from Egypt’s Old Kingdom period. For nearly two centuries, the subterranean chambers beneath some of Saqqara’s pyramids were inscribed with hundreds of ritual texts carved in hieroglyphs. In this lecture, Christelle Alvarez will discuss the final Old Kingdom pyramid to bear such inscriptions: the tomb of King Qakare Ibi. Smaller than its predecessors, badly damaged, and marked by architectural and textual idiosyncrasies, this monument has often been dismissed as marginal to the main Pyramid Text tradition. Alvarez argues that Qakare Ibi’s pyramid actually provides a rare glimpse into the process of monumentalizing ritual texts, revealing how this tradition was composed, transmitted, and continually reshaped over time.
Free parking is available at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 5 pm.
Advance registration is recommended.
About the Speaker
Christelle Alvarez is Assistant Professor of Egyptology at Brown University. Her research focuses on ancient Egyptian philology, epigraphy, ritual beliefs and practices, and the socio-historical context of the third millennium BCE. She is also interested in digital humanities and is currently developing the Digital Pyramid Texts project. A member of the Mission archéologique franco-suisse de Saqqâra (MafS) since 2011, Alvarez leads fieldwork at the pyramid of King Qakare Ibi (Eighth Dynasty, ca. 2150–2134 BCE) in South Saqqara. She is currently completing her book entitled Inscribing the Pyramid of King Qakare Ibi. She studied Egyptology and Coptic at the University of Geneva (BA and MA) and holds a MSt and DPhil in Egyptology from the University of Oxford. Before coming to Brown, she worked with the Collaborative Research Centre project Episteme in Motion: Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period at the Freie Universität Berlin, and with the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures at the University of Oxford.
Photo Credit: Christelle Alvarez