In the fall of 2019 (BC: Before Covid) I packed my bags and my mum to spend one month in sunny Luxor. Staying in a flat on the rural west bank of the Nile, I planned to relax, work on a PhD proposal and take lots of photographs. With the assistance of Julia Thorne from…
People of the Cobra Province
With The People of the Cobra Province in Egypt (Oxbow Books, 2020), Wolfram Grajetzki attempts to write a ‘history from below’ of the Wadjet nome, a province south of Asyut in Middle Egypt. Here, about 5000 burials have been uncovered of the farming population, many of which are poor surface burials. Little Old and Middle…
Luxor Journal
On this 91st consecutive Sunday since lockdown, I thought it might be nice to write about my stay in Egypt in November-December of last year. It’s based on my actual journal, with some accompanying photos. Enjoy! 18 November 2019 On a dreary Monday in November, after my short contract working on a project in a…
Order and chaos in Assassin’s Creed: Origins
So it took me a while to start playing Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and the truth is, I haven’t finished it. I who am scared of dying in videogames ever since Super Mario Bros on the original NES, has been roaming Ptolemaic Egypt for over 80 hours now, sneaking up on countless Romans in order to…
Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt
In the past few years, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has had an active policy of reporting new discoveries in Egypt on a frequent basis, to keep Egypt positively in the news as well as interest tourists in visiting the country. Indeed tourism has largely picked up again since the 2011 revolution, and in the…
Thomas Cook and the way to see the Nile
When Thomas Cook went bankrupt in September 2019, hundreds of thousands of holiday makers were stranded. Tens of thousands of employees were out of a job, including many local service providers. Thomas Cook and Son was a household name in the travel industry, two men who single-handedly invented organised travel, and paved the way for…
From the bust of Nefertiti to the head of Tutankhamun
When Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley visited Bolton Museum as a child, she was unaware that the bust of Nefertiti she admired there was in fact a replica. She soon found copies of the work popping up in museums around England. The original bust was first displayed when the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun was causing…
A visit to Cambridge
Last week the Do Not Touch? 3D in Museums conference took place organised by The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In order to give a very short talk (5 minutes!) about digitising the tomb chapel of Hetepherakhty, I paid a visit to this lovely town. Thanks to the awesome Rennan Lemos I was a guest at…