This talk will be held at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies’ Rome Auditorium. The auditorium is located at 1619 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC. Here’s a link to a map on Google.com to help you find your way.

In  Dr. O’Connor’s  lecture,  entitled “Mysteries  of  Abydos: Excavating  and  Saving  the  Monuments  of  Egypt’s Earliest  Pharaohs,” he will  describe  the  revealing  discoveries  that are  being  made  about  these  enigmatic  monuments  to  Egypt’s  earliest kings; their documentation  and  preservation;  and  the  intensive  conservation and stabilization program  that  will  assure  the  survival  of  the  greatest  of them for  the  next  5000 years  and  more.

For more details, please visit the page on ARCEDC.org for this event: http://arcedc.wordpress.com/september-2011-egyptology-lecture/

• Our speaker: Dr. Miroslav Bárta, Professor of Egyptology, Charles University, Prague.
• Location: Benjamin T. Rome Auditorium of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.
• Topic: Swimmers in the Sand: On the Origins of Ancient Egyptian Civilization.
• For more info, please see our events page.

There will be a charge to take this course and the text will be Middle Egyptian Grammar by James E. Hoch. Those interested should contact Dr. Fatma Ismail at fatmatalat at hotmail dot com.

You may be able to find more information about the course on the JHU website: http://www.jhu.edu.

Books by Dr. Barta on Amazon.com

2011-2012 Schedule of Events (click to enlarge)

Here’s the schedule for the 2011-2012 season. Click on the image to enlarge it — then you can print it. If you’d prefer, you can see a Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version instead.

ITEM #1

The Basel museum volunteered to return this piece immediately after discovering that it was a stolen from Saqqara. The Antikhenmuseum has already sent back the eye of a colossal quartzite statue of Amenhotep III (c. 1390-1352 BC) found in 1970 at his funerary temple in Kom el-Hettan area on the Luxor west bank. The eye was smuggled out of the country and loaned to the museum by a private collector, where it was recognised by Egyptologist, Hourig Sourouzian, and returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in October 2008.

Hawass will shortly be contacting the ministry of foreign affairs to arrange for an MSAA representative to travel to Switzerland to collect the relief.  Hawass stated that the return of this object is also significant because it is the first artefact to be repatriated to Egypt since the January 25 Revolution.  The MSAA continues its campaign to repatriate stolen artefacts with determination and perseverance.

In response to foreign criticism that the situation in Egypt is not safe enough for objects to be returned, Hawass counters that of the many museums in the country, the Egyptian Museum was the only one to suffer during the revolution. The Museum was protected by a human chain of youth demonstrating in Tahrir Square. He also points out that the one million tourists who were in Egypt at the time all left the country safely.

Hawass argued that if what happened in Cairo – that the police abandoned the streets for 4 hours on 28 January, 2011 – had happened in any other city in the world there would be chaos, thefts and destruction on an even greater scale. Therefore, he insists, artefacts stolen from Egypt should be returned, adding that many other pieces are due back soon.

ITEM #2

The tour runs from November 5-20, 2011.

For highlights of the tour, more details and registration, please see http://arce.org/main/2011-arce-tour.

Here’s the link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aUzOMh9hR4

If you’d like to watch other videos about Egyptology, see http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=egyptology&aq=f

Finally, if you’d like to take a peek at Dr. Klemm’s book on Amazon, see http://amzn.to/ea8vt0.