EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Sarah Belzoni’s grave restored After the early death of Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778-1823), his apparently Bristol-born wife Sarah (née Parker-Brown, 1783-1870: for both see Who Was Who in Egyptology, pp.52-53) initially continued to try to exhibit and publish his finds in London and Paris, but ‘retired’ in 1833 to Brussels, where she lived for over 30 years. In the mid-1860s she settled on Jersey, dying in Bellozanne Road, St Helier, at the age of 87 on 12 January 1870. The location of her grave was believed lost until it was ‘rediscovered’ in 2011 in the Mont à l’Abbé cemetery, St Helier, by the team effort of John J Taylor, Vic Geary and Anna Baghiani (see EA 40, p.36 with a photograph of the gravestones as found). Since the inscription and stones were badly weathered, an appeal was issued to raise funds for their restoration and thanks to the generosity of a local resident Philip Hewat-Jaboor, together with Mark Reynolds of Jersey Monumental Co, the gravestones have now been restored and were unveiled by the Constable of St Helier on 14 November 2012. As Chair of the EES Trustees and of the Egypt Society of Bristol, I was very
The restored gravestones of Sarah Belzoni: the smaller stone was originally the footstone. Photograph: Aidan Dodson
pleased to be invited to attend the ceremony. At her death, Sarah still possessed some of the watercolour copies of the decoration of the tomb of Sety I, originally used for making the scale models of the tomb exhibited by Giovanni and Sarah in London and Paris, plus some of her and Giovanni’s notebooks. These were bequeathed to her unmarried god-daughter Selina Belzoni Tucker, who died, aged 72, in Weston-super-Mare in 1893. She, in turn, left them to her cousin Sarah Ann Wilson (née Tucker, 18441921). Her son, Charles Edward Wilson (b.1872), gave the surviving Belzoni material to Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery in 1900. AIDAN DODSON
EES news and events Regular news updates are posted on our website, www.ees.ac.uk, which we would urge readers to consult regularly for up-to-the-minute information on all EES activities, including our current fieldwork and research. EES news can also be found on our Facebook page: http://tinyurl. com/eesfacebookpage. If you would like to receive our regular e-newsletter please e-mail: contact@ees.ac.uk On Saturday 8 December 2012, the EES Study Day Howard Carter: the man behind the mask, the Annual General Meeting, Annual Lecture and Christmas Party were held in the Brunei Gallery at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Speakers at the Study Day were Aidan Dodson, John Wyatt and Lee Young, Marcel Marée, and Marianne Eaton-Krauss. The Annual Lecture was given by Jacobus van Dijk (left), of the University of Groningen, on The Pre-royal Career of Horemheb or How the General became King. Photograph: Robert Brown. Right: members at the Christmas Party. Photograph: Dyan Hilton. The Society held another successful Study Day at York University on 1 September 2012 on the topic of The Journey to the Afterlife with talks from Maarten Raven, Stephen Buckley and Joann Fletcher, Garry Shaw, and Harco Willems. Right: Maarten Raven and Garry Shaw at the registration desk in the medieval King’s Manor where the event was held. Photograph: Tilly Burton.
On 25 October 2012 the EES London Office had a visit from Kim Ryholt, Fredrik Hagen and Hratch Papazian, with undergraduate students on the Egyptology programme of the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. After a brief talk on the history of the Society and its work in Egypt, they viewed material in the Library and Archive, including some of Petrie’s correspondence.
In November 2012 EES members visited Egypt on an exclusive tour organised for the Society by Ancient World Tours (www.ancient.co.uk) and accompanied by Chris Naunton. They visited many sites not normally open to the public and had the benefit of on-site talks from a number of Field Directors to whom the EES is very grateful. On the left, Francesco Tiradritti talks about his team’s work at the Theban tomb of Harwa and, on the right, Günter Dreyer describes the German Archaeological Institute excavations in the early dynastic royal cemetery at Abydos.