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11/9: Book talk - The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (berkeley)
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"Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife"
Sunday November 9, 2025, 3 PM Pacific Standard Time
MELC Lounge, Room 254 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
Because of nearby construction, please allow extra time to park your vehicle.
This is an in-person lecture and is not virtual. No registration is required.
The lecture will be recorded for later publication on the chapter's YouTube channel.
About the Lecture:
The overall model for understanding the ancient Egyptian afterlife in scholarship and popular culture alike is well known: The ancient Egyptians believed in a post-mortem judgement that would determine their fate in the afterlife, being either rewarded with an eternal life of bliss or punished with painful annihilation. However, in my new book Yearning for Immortality, I argue that for the most part these ideas were in place well before the decipherment of hieroglyphs and thus draw more on Greek and especially Christian frameworks for life after death than on ancient Egyptian ones, meaning that our model for understanding the Egyptian afterlife is due for a fundamental rethinking. This lecture covers some of the main results presented in Yearning for Immortality before turning to the question, raised only briefly in the last chapter of the book, of what such a rethinking might look like. If we cannot read texts like the “Book of the Dead” as straightforward descriptions of the Egyptian afterlife, then what sources can we draw on to get a sense of ancient Egyptian ideas of life and death? And correspondingly, what strategies for reading and viewing funerary texts and art can we use to approximate an indigenous understanding as opposed to one projecting Western models of postmortem existence?
About the Speaker:
Dr. Rune Nyord is Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, where he is also Chair of the Art History Department. His research focuses on conceptions and experiences of representation, ontology, and personhood in ancient Egypt, especially as evidenced in funerary culture, and drawing on a combination of archaeological and textual sources. He is also interested in the history of the discipline of Egyptology and ways in which it continues to influence contemporary practices and interpretations. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, the most recent being the monograph Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (Chicago 2025) and a co-edited special issue of Interdisciplinary Egyptology titled Egyptology in Dialogue (Vienna, 2025).
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Parking is available in UC lots all day on weekends, for a fee. Ticket dispensing machines accept debit or credit cards. Parking is available in lots around the Social Sciences Building, and in lots along Bancroft. A map of the campus is available online at http://www.berkeley.edu/map/ .
About Northern California ARCE:
For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://www.facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://bsky.app/profile/khentiamentiu.bsky.social, and https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select "Berkeley, CA" as your chapter when you sign up.