The NYU Institute of Fine Arts presents
Ancient Seminar Program with Nadine Moeller
Tell Edfu: Recent Discoveries at a Provincial Capital
Nadine Moeller (Yale)
Thursday, October 19, 2023 @ 6:30pm EST
James B. Duke House
1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075
and via Zoom
This event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required.
RSVP for in-person attendance | RSVP for virtual attendance
The recent fieldwork at Tell Edfu has focused on two excavations areas, one dating to the later Old Kingdom (Zone 2) and the other to the early New Kingdom (Zone 1). Zone 2 consists of open courtyards and the two large, official buildings (the southern and the northern) that can now be linked based on the associated finds excavated in the courtyards, to a royal domain which would be the first example attested archaeologically. It is closely linked to royal expeditions into the Eastern Desert for the extraction of raw materials, in particular copper ore. The associated clay sealings and ceramics date this activity to the end of the 5th Dynasty and the reign of Djedkare - Isesi. Excavations in Zone 1 comprise several buildings of an elite town quarter dating to the early New Kingdom. A large urban villa measuring more than 500 square meters has been discovered here which includes a small shrine in the corner of the main columned hall that was dedicated to the worship of the ancestors. Several cult objects have been found in and around the shrine, which had been left there when the building was abandoned. This discovery is a unique opportunity to investigate private religious practices through the various cult objects that were found in situ as well as their archaeological context and the architectural elements of the shrine. It also sheds new light on the provenance and function of similar objects that can be seen in many museum collections and for which the archaeological context is frequently missing.
Nadine Moeller is currently Professor of Egyptology at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale. After receiving her D.Phil., she held the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford (2004-2007). Before coming to Yale, she was Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the Oriental Institute (now called Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures) and the Department of NELC at the University of Chicago (2007-2020).
Her main research interests include settlement archaeology and urbanism in ancient Egypt, household archaeology and climate change in antiquity. She is author of The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge 2016), and co-editor together with Karen Radner (LMU Munich) and Dan Potts (NYU/ISAW) of the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (Oxford 2020-), a five-volume project to replace the ‘Cambridge Ancient History.’
In Egypt she has been directing the ongoing excavations at Tell Edfu together with Gregory Marouard since 2010, and she has also participated in numerous excavations and fieldwork projects at other sites in Egypt such as Abu Rawash, Memphis, Dendara, Theban West Bank, Valley of the Kings, and Elephantine.
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed to those who join us by Zoom. Zoom details will be available upon registration for virtual attendees.