“Approaches to Egyptian Urbanism”
Carol Redmount
Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley
Wednesday, October 25, 12:00-1:30pm
Cal Design Lab, Wurster 494, Wurster Hall
Until recently Egyptologists typically either understudied or ignored Egyptian urbanism in favor of tombs, temples and texts. In 1960 an eminent scholar even characterized Egypt as a “civilization without cities;” not until 1979 did archaeologists definitively rebut this assessment. Only in 2016 was the first extensive, scholarly treatment of Egyptian urbanism published. This talk examines past and present approaches to ancient Egyptian cities and suggests future directions for research and interpretation.
Carol Redmount is Associate Professor and Chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department and past President of the American Research Center in Egypt. An archaeologist with extensive field experience (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, Tunisia, U.S.), she has spent many years excavating urban sites and interpreting them from a primarily historical perspective. As Director of UC Berkeley’s El Hibeh Project, she presently investigates a first millennium B.C.E. provincial urban site in Middle Egypt and is developing a more urbanism-oriented and theoretically engaged approach to the site, an approach that is informing her in-progress publications relating to the site of El Hibeh and to Egyptian urbanism more generally.