EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
In Petrie’s footsteps On 8 December 2011 one of our Vice-Presidents, Margaret Drower, celebrated her 100th birthday. Peggy (as she is always known) was a member of EES excavation teams at Armant and Amarna in the late 1920s and 1930s and served on the Society’s governing Committee for many years. She has also been the EES Honorary Secretary and Chairman. Peggy was one of Petrie’s students of Egyptology at University College London, where she herself was later to teach for many years, and it was appropriate that she became Petrie’s biographer, publishing Flinders Petrie. A Life in Archaeology in 1985. While researching for the biography Peggy sorted, catalogued and transcribed many of the letters in the EES Lucy Gura Archive which is now, at last, being rehoused in environmentally approved conditions, as Chris Naunton describes opposite. Chris himself is following in Petrie’s footsteps (literally) as the presenter of a BBC Wales documentary In Search of Petrie, currently in production, tracing Petrie’s life from his first surveying expeditions in England to his death in Jerusalem in 1942. Chris and the BBC team have been filming in Egypt and Israel as well as in England. The programme will be shown in the UK on BBC Four later this year. At the end of 2011 Chris succeeded me as EES Director and while he settles in to his new role Joanna Kyffin has been appointed on a contract basis to look after the Society’s outreach and education activities. Jo is an Egyptologist who has recently completed a research fellowship at the University of Copenhagen and already teaches hieroglyphs classes for the Society. She also gave a talk on her research speciality, magical texts, at the Study Day which preceded our Annual General Meeting on 10 December 2011 (see opposite). At the AGM members elected Alan Lloyd, our former Chairman, to serve as President of the Society. Alan will need no introduction to EES members, nor to the wider world of Egyptology, and we are all pleased that he is willing to continue to help promote the Society. Members also elected a new Chair, Aidan Dodson, to succeed Karen Exell, following her appointment to a post at UCL Qatar, and a new Treasurer, Susan Royce, in succession to Paul Cove, who retired The BBC Wales TV crew setting up to film at after three years of Tanis, the first site excavated by Petrie for the service. The AGM Egypt Exploration Fund ended with the
Margaret Drower at a party with friends and former colleagues, held in north London a few days before her 100th birthday on 8 December 2011. Photograph reproduced courtesy of her daughter, Laila Hackforth-Jones
approval of new governing Articles of Association for the Society which are now available on our website (www.ees.ac.uk). This Olympic year will see many events inspired by the games, including a special evening Training, Cheating, Winning, Praising: Athletes and Shows in Papyri from Roman Egypt at the British Academy in London on 20 June with talks about the Society’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection. The thousands of papyri in the collection (housed at the Sackler Library in Oxford) are the only antiquities still owned by the Society, which publishes them in the Graeco-Roman Memoirs series. Two volumes appeared at the end of 2011 with a further two scheduled to appear during 2012, bringing the GRM up-to-date with the EES subscription year for the first time in a number of years an achievement which owes much to the General Editors; Nikolaos Gonis, Dirk Obbink and Peter Parsons. ‘Digging Diary’ (pp.25-28) has reports from many expeditions that worked in Egypt during the summer and autumn of 2011. Most were able to work normally despite the continuing unrest in the country, though some had to concentrate on dealing with damage to magazines or sites vandalised during the spring of 2011 and other expeditions, particularly in the desert ‘pyramids area’ were asked not to excavate. The Society’s own magazine and workroom at Memphis were not spared damage, as David Jeffreys reports on p.6, but through the generosity of Mark Lehner and the Ancient Egypt Research Associates the workroom has been rebuilt and will be used by trainees at future field schools at Memphis. Training young Egyptian archaeologists is vital for the health of the subject and the Society is very pleased to be so active now in this regard with the field schools at Memphis and Quesna (see pp.5-8) and additional training taking place at other sites, such as Tell Basta (see p.12). The spring fieldwork season is just getting under way and we will be sending teams to Luxor and to a number of sites in the Nile Delta. As usual our expeditions will be sending regular updates and as soon as they are up and running we will post details on our website, so please do check regularly for the latest news of all our fieldwork and research in Egypt. PATRICIA SPENCER