Sally Katary Memorial Lecture 2026

2026's Sally Katary Memorial Lecture took place on Saturday 30th May 2026 at 1:00pm EST as a hybrid event held online and in person.

The presenter was Professor Dr. Richard Bussmann, (Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cologne, Germany, and leader of the 'Archaeology and Heritage in Middle Egypt' excavation project at Zawyet Sultan). His presentation was entitled:
“A Provincial Community of the Pyramid Age: Bodies and Identities in the Funerary Landscape of Zawyet Sultan”.

Provincial Egypt is a prism for studying social organization at the grassroots of ancient Egyptian society. The local elites have played a pivotal role for mediating central power in their communities. Much research is focused on the nomarchs of the late Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom. The rest of the provincial population has received far less attention, not least because members of mid- and low-ranking social groups have left few texts or visual material, so must be approached via the material culture. This talk reviews current scholarship for social modelling and presents the results of fresh fieldwork from Zawyet Sultan, Middle Egypt, to explore which future avenues of research might shed new light on bodies and identities in provincial communities.

Richard Bussmann studied Egyptology, Assyriology and Theology at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin and Göttingen. He obtained his PhD in 2007 from the Free University Berlin with a thesis on the local community shrines of Egypt in the Third millennium. Bussmann was a lecturer in Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology at University College London from 2010 to 2016 and is full professor of Egyptology at the University of Cologne since 2016. He leads an excavation project in Zawyet Sultan entitled "Archaeology and Heritage in Middle Egypt" and was recently awarded an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council for the project "SUBALTERNEGY: Subalternity in early Egypt". The project explores the social organization and cultural dispositions of low-status groups in the age of the pyramids. His research interests are the archaeology and society of ancient Egypt, comparative approaches to early complex societies, the integration of visual, material and written culture, and social and cultural theory in Egyptology.

This was a fund-raising event in aid of the Sally L.D. Katary Travel Scholarship.

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