Alternative Geographies for Egyptology
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Dates
October 23–24, 2025
Location
McDonald Institute Seminar Room
Area
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Alternative Geographies for Egyptology in the 21st Century
This conference addresses the need for new and alternative geographies in Egyptology, with a view to questioning how we understand ancient Egypt internally, relationally, and theoretically. The conception of Egypt as a homogenous, territorial nation-state is not only a modern distortion due to the Eurocentric development of Egyptology, but also the deliberate product of the ancient Egyptian worldview, elite culture, and royal ideology. Alternative geographies are therefore needed in order to achieve a more realistic understanding of ancient Egypt in its complexity and diversity, and Global History may outline three possible avenues for their definition and implementation.Agenda
The first avenue of research, within Egypt, is the analysis of localities, the agency of citizens at the local level, and the networks that localities and citizens formed: this should dismantle the unrealistic notion of the homogeneity of Egypt as a centralized state under the control of the pharaonic monarchy. The second avenue of research is connectivity: the ancient Egyptian civilization should be reappraised not as a unique and exceptional phenomenon, but as the product of its global interconnectedness across Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean, in a “glocal” perspective. Finally, the third avenue consists of comparative and theoretical research across temporal, spatial, and disciplinary boundaries, regardless of direct connections, which should challenge Egyptological knowledge against place-specific situations across the entire spectrum of world history and human experience.
Participants
University of Cambridge Department of Archaeology, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
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The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research provides a shared intellectual home for archaeologists at Cambridge and their collaborators into all aspects of the human past, across time and space:
- as a research facilitator of the Department of Archaeology, supporting the work of Department staff, postdoctoral fellows and students
- as an interdisciplinary centre for archaeology in Collegiate Cambridge, serving staff in a variety of divisions, faculties, museums and colleges (affiliation enquiries and applications should be sent to the McDonald Administrator)
- as a postdoctoral research institute within the Department of Archaeology. In this role the Institute independently supports archaeological fieldwork, other archaeological research, research fellows, visiting scholars, conferences and publications
