The August meeting of the Essex Egyptology Group is a little different from the other meetings – it’s the AGM, and so instead of an invited speaker we have 10 minute talks given by members and a book auction for charity.
This year we had five speakers. After a few technical hitches I was the first speaker and talked about the tomb of Kha and Merit, as we’d seen the items from there in the Turin Egyptian Museum last October. J videoed my talk, and it’s up online here. I was followed by Blake Sellors who talked to us about Hatshepsut and her temple at Deir el Bahri, focussing on how she used the reliefs in the temple to legitimise her rule. Tilly Burton then spoke to us about the image of the Pharaoh trampling his enemies as a bull (or other creature), showing us how the same imagery is used (in words as well as pictures) from the early Dynastic times through to the New Kingdom. Janet Brewer told us about the discovery by the French, acquisition by the British and decipherment by a Frenchman of the Rosetta Stone. And finally Dave Sutton showed us some of his collection of postcards of Egypt dating from the early 20th Century – which showed what the tourist sites in Egypt were like before the High Dam and in many cases before all the sand had been cleared away.
The book auction was, as always, full of tempting books – we managed to escape fairly lightly, but also in possession of all the ones that we’d really wanted. Most were egyptology books, obviously, and J had set his sights on a John Romer book about Deir el Medina which we got. We also got a book about Egypt, Greece & Rome, and from the non-egyptological books I got a book of aerial photos from around the world plus a Michael Wood book about the Domesday Book. Most books sold (although there were a few leftover for a charity shop) and we’ll be giving the money to the EES library for the conservation of a book.