Day Two of the ARCE Meeting (Conclusion)

     The second day of this year's ARCE annual meeting ended (for me) with two papers the first of which was delivered by Hassan Ramadan, one of several Egyptian scholars who spoke at this year's meeting. This paper (entitled "The Western Cemetery Excavation of the tomb of Hetepet at Giza") detailed excavation work done on the Fifth Dynasty (sometime after the reign of Neferkara) mastaba of Hetepet.

     Next, Geoff Embering (University of Michigan) spoke on the "Memories of the Kings of Kush: New Excavations Around the Royal Cemetery at el_Kurru". The paper detailed the work of Dr. Embering and his team in a post-Dynasty 25 Nubian cemetery.  The team attempted to locate some structures mentioned by Reisner and looked at a pyramid dating to the fourth century B. C. This pyramid was considered to be in danger of collapsing and architecture experts were brought in to determine how to prevent that from happening. It is suspected that this pyramid may not have actually been used for a burial.

     Day three started with Dr. Rita Lucarelli speaking about the "Dead Vignettes of the Greek Magical Papyri". Dr. Lucarelli showed a number of interesting vignettes from some Greek papyri and made some suggestions about their interpretation. One of these shows a square with a large "X" running through it. On top of it are two animal heads (Set animals?), while underneath it is a large snake (Apopis?). Is it a stela? A representation of the coffin of Osiris? Or does it represent a gate (from the underworld?). Another interesting vignette shown and discussed is a round topped stela with a winged snake and a human holding a knife, with this scene coming from Spell 149 of the Book of the Dead.