Description | This lecture will discuss excavation in the Valley of the Kings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using the personal archives of some of the lesser-known figures in Egyptology to recreate the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptian archaeology. These individuals include artists and draftsmen who worked in the Valley, and the close relatives of several prominent Egyptologists. The diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews are one such example: traveling along the Nile with American lawyer-turned-archaeologist Theodore M. Davis between 1889 - 1913, Emma’s journals provide insights into contemporary society and Egyptological networks, and detailed eyewitness observations of significant archaeological discoveries. Dr. Sarah Ketchley is an Egyptologist specializing in the art history in the first millennium BCE. Based at the University of Washington in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, she teaches introductory and graduate-level classes in digital humanities and directs a long-running undergraduate internship program. Inspired by intrepid women travelers of the 19th century, Sarah works with students to digitize and publish a range of primary source material from the period, including the Nile travel diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews. Working computationally to analyze the content of Emma's writings, Sarah and her students have created an extensive digital biographical database, interactive maps, and an archive of encoded primary source material from the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptian archaeology. |
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