Over the past year, many universities have started experimenting with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Free of charge, these courses offer interesting video lectures and readings and often invite the ‘student’ to take part in online discussions. In the field of Egyptology, the universities of Manchester and Liverpool have taken the lead. Two of the…
A year in the life of Ancient Egypt
Should you judge a book by its writer? Or a writer by just one book? In other words, are author and work one and the same? In this case, I would argue no. To start with the author, Ann Rosalie David is a pioneering expert in the field of biomedical research in Egyptology. She basically invented…
Mrs. Tsenhor
Sometimes in life, things happen at the right moment. When Koen Donker van Heel encouraged me to start my own business, I hadn’t read his new book Mrs. Tsenhor yet, which was published in 2014 by the always lovely AUC Press (hardcover, nice design, sparkling white pages). Now that I have, I am affirmed in…
Artefacts of Petrie
When the Englishman William Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) first came to Egypt, he was 27 years old. Visitors to the Giza plateau must have looked up in suprise when they noticed a young man in pink pyjamas emerging from one of the rock tombs in the morning. In the desert glare it almost seemed as if…
Egypt in 3D adventure games
My love for 3D reconstructions of ancient sites is founded on those turn of the millenium computer games that were described as ‘edutainment’. As a true nerd, I revelled in 3D point-and-click adventures that brought the player back to ancient places such as Egypt, Mexico and China. The beauty of these games was that they…
The stubborn travels of Alexine Tinne
Alexandrine Tinne (1835-1869) was the daughter of a wealthy merchant in 19th century The Hague. Her father left her a fortune so vast that she could spend it at will on as lavish a lifestyle as she desired. But instead of wasting her inheritance on elaborate dinner parties and other pastimes of ‘Haguois’ high society,…