Lecture reveals history behind ancient Egyptian pottery
Jennifer Lewis
Issue date: 1/28/10 Section: TruLife
The Egyptian pottery residing in the Ophelia Parrish art gallery is accompanied by a story about how it had been unearthed and nestled safely in those glass cases. Sara Orel, art history professor and temporary curator of the exhibit, told the story in her faculty forum presentation "The Garstang Excavations at Beni Hasan, Egypt" on Jan. 26 in Magruder Hall 2001.
Orel said she is intimately familiar with the pottery, on loan from The Royal Ontario Museum, because she wrote her dissertation in 1989 on the excavations performed by John Garstang in Beni Hasan, Egypt, where the pottery originated. She said she chose to focus on Beni Hasan because of its size and significance to the ordinary people of ancient Egypt.
"It has one of the largest and best-excavated and preserved sets of burials of people who are essentially part of the middle class," Orel said. "I have always been interested in daily life, not kings or queens and historical artifacts, but more the archaeological material."
Orel said Beni Hasan is an Egyptian tourist site, but the numerous middle class tombs often get overlooked because of their simplicity.
"There are some beautiful rock-cut tombs on the cliff above that belong to provincial governors," Orel said. "Then down below there are all these pits, which are essentially tombs, and people go to see the tombs at Beni Hasan and they see the really nice rock-cut ones and they don't even see the 800 tombs that are on the hillside below."
She said she thinks the most interesting thing about the pottery artifacts of the middle class is the lingering impression of human use.
"You can really see how people used it, what they did with it, and you can often see fingerprints on the pottery," Orel said. "It's more immediate. You can see a temple, and it's a temple, but with pottery somebody held this, somebody made this, somebody drank from it or ate from it. That's much more interesting to me."
Orel said she took all the information she had stored about the Garstang Excavations and the pottery discovered there and decided to funnel it into a faculty forum lecture and organize the arrival of a collection of the very pottery she was discussing.
Orel said she is intimately familiar with the pottery, on loan from The Royal Ontario Museum, because she wrote her dissertation in 1989 on the excavations performed by John Garstang in Beni Hasan, Egypt, where the pottery originated. She said she chose to focus on Beni Hasan because of its size and significance to the ordinary people of ancient Egypt.
"It has one of the largest and best-excavated and preserved sets of burials of people who are essentially part of the middle class," Orel said. "I have always been interested in daily life, not kings or queens and historical artifacts, but more the archaeological material."
Orel said Beni Hasan is an Egyptian tourist site, but the numerous middle class tombs often get overlooked because of their simplicity.
"There are some beautiful rock-cut tombs on the cliff above that belong to provincial governors," Orel said. "Then down below there are all these pits, which are essentially tombs, and people go to see the tombs at Beni Hasan and they see the really nice rock-cut ones and they don't even see the 800 tombs that are on the hillside below."
She said she thinks the most interesting thing about the pottery artifacts of the middle class is the lingering impression of human use.
"You can really see how people used it, what they did with it, and you can often see fingerprints on the pottery," Orel said. "It's more immediate. You can see a temple, and it's a temple, but with pottery somebody held this, somebody made this, somebody drank from it or ate from it. That's much more interesting to me."
Orel said she took all the information she had stored about the Garstang Excavations and the pottery discovered there and decided to funnel it into a faculty forum lecture and organize the arrival of a collection of the very pottery she was discussing.
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