The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California Chapter,
and the Near Eastern Studies Department, University of California,
Berkeley, invite you to attend a lecture by PROF. DR. VERENA LEPPER,
NATIONAL MUSEUMS, BERLIN:"THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF ELEPHANTINE ISLAND"
SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 2023, 3 PM PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
ROOM 20 SOCIAL SCIENCES BUILDING (FORMERLY BARROWS HALL)
UC BERKELEY
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Elephantine was a militarily and strategically very important island
on the river Nile at the southern border of Egypt. No other settlement
in Egypt is so well attested through texts over such a long period of
time, 4000 years. Its inhabitants form a multi-ethnic, multicultural
and multi-religious community that left us vast amounts of written
sources detailing their everyday lives from the Old Kingdom to beyond
the Arab Conquest. Today, several thousand papyri and other
manuscripts from Elephantine are scattered in more than 60
institutions in 24 different countries across Europe and beyond. Their
texts are written in ten different languages and scripts, including
Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic and Arabic. 80%
of these manuscripts were unpublished or unstudied before.
Thus, access was gained to these texts, making them publicly available
in an open access online research database. Links could be identified
between papyrus fragments from different collections, and an
international 'papyrus puzzle' undertaken, incorporating cutting-edge
methods from digital humanities, physics and mathematics (e.g. for the
virtual unfolding of papyri). For the first time in the history of
papyrology, papyrus packages can now be read virtually, without
physically opening them. Using this database with medical, religious,
legal, administrative, even literary texts, the everyday life of the
local and global (i.e. 'glocal') community of Elephantine can be
studied. Elephantine can thus be used as a case study and a model for
the past, present and future.
ABOUT THE LECTURER:
PROF. DR. VERENA LEPPER is the Curator of the Egyptian and Oriental
Papyrus Collection of the Egyptian Museum, National Museums Berlin
(Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) and Honorary Professor at the
Humboldt University Berlin. She is in charge of a collection with
around 30,000 objects in ten different languages and scripts and has
managed several exhibition and research projects in Germany and abroad
(Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Bonn, Doha, Harvard) with a team of employees.
She conducts research on topics such as Egyptian and Oriental papyri,
literary and cultural history, and the history of science and art. To
this end, she has published numerous books and exhibition catalogues
with international publishers.
Dr. Lepper studied Egyptology, Semitic Philology, Christian Orient
Studies and Hebrew Bible at Bonn, Cologne, Tuebingen, Oxford and
Harvard University. She has received several awards for her scientific
and curatorial work, including the highly renowned ERC-Grant from the
European Research Council for the project: “Elephantine”.
To promote Arab-German academic exchange, she founded the Arab-German
Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) in 2013. She is
involved in numerous committees in the field of scientific and
cultural policy and diplomacy. Visiting professorships and fellowships
have also taken her to Harvard and Princeton University.
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Parking is available in UC lots all day on weekends, for a fee. Ticket
dispensing machines accept debit or credit cards. Parking is available
in lots around the SOCIAL SCIENCES BUILDING, and in lots along
Bancroft. A map of the campus is available online at
http://www.berkeley.edu/map/ [http://www.berkeley.edu/map/]
ABOUT ARCE-NC:
For more information, please visit
https://facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE/
[https://facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE/],
https://twitter.com/ARCENCPostings
[https://twitter.com/ARCENCPostings], or https://khentiamentiu.org
[https://khentiamentiu.org]. To join the chapter or renew your
membership, please go to https://www.arce.org/general-membership
[https://www.arce.org/general-membership] and select "Berkeley, CA" as
your chapter when you sign up.
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17/04/2023 Last update