About the lecture
Ancient jewellery is typically associated with highly specialised goldmiths’ craft and semi-precious stones. Yet, ‘imitations’ of the various minerals in artificially created materials were as prevalent and prestigious. If the surviving images and tomb finds reflect ancient lived realities, the scent of fresh flowers worn over the brow, around the neck, and on the arm has been even more important and omnipresent. Nonetheless, flowers as adornment did not make it into either of the major reference works on ancient Egyptian materials (Lucas 3rd ed. 1962; Nicholson and Shaw eds 2004), and only marginally into the flora section of The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology (2017). We will be taking a look at the scope of organic adornment worn by the highest elite in ancient Egypt and discuss how much of the value of jewellery and especially its materiality is culturally invested.
About Dr. Wasmuth
Melanie Wasmuth is an ancient socio-cultural historian especially interested in the social dynamics and individual life experiences behind the material reflections of crossregional mobility and contact in the Mediterranean and West Asian area of connectivity in the 8th to 4th c. BCE. Following her studies at the universities of D-Tübingen, UK-Cambridge, D-Munich, and A-Vienna, and research, teaching, and education commitments at Basel, NL-Leiden, and Amsterdam, Melanie Wasmuth is currently the viceleader of Team 2 (Social Scientific Theories and Applications) of the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires at the University of Helsinki and a research associate at the University of Basel: Egyptology. Since 2019, she holds the title of docent (dosetti) in Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Helsinki.
Digital event - how to participate
The seminar will be held digitally. If you wish to attend a lecture, you need to register in advance.
A zoom link will be sent to you before the event.
You can download Zoom or use your browser: https://zoom.us/download
This lecture is part of the lecture series Ancient Adornment
Suggestions for further Reading
- Wasmuth Melanie 2021. “Petrification as a Research Approach: its Terminological Potential for Material Culture Studies,” in Petrification Processes in Matter and Society (Themes in Contemporary Archaeology), ed. Sophie Hüglin, Alexander Gramsch and Liisa Seppänen, 35–42. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
- Tomashevska Marija 2019. Sacred Floral Garlands and Collars from the New Kingdom Period and Early Third Intermediate Paeriod in Ancient Egypt (1550 B.C. – 943 B.C.). MA thesis, Universiteit Leiden. https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/77994.
- Malleson Claire 2017. “Flora of Ancient Egypt,” in The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology, ed. Ian Shaw and Elizabeth Bloxam, 125–150. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
About the lecture series
A Digital Lecture Series on strategies of body adornment in ancient Mediterranean cultures
With this lecture series, we wish to reflect on different kinds of body adornment such as jewellery, headdresses, seals, staffs, weapons, tattoos, and cosmetics. It is our aim to investigate aesthetics and strategies of adorning bodies in ancient Mediterranean cultures, and to explore how body adornment relates to gender, hierarchy, and power.
Seven excellent international researchers, experts on the material cultures and texts of the ancient Mediterranean, will present a 30-minute lecture, followed by amble time for questions and discussion.
We are interested in mapping body adornment as broadly as possible and therefore we encourage our speakers to consider this topic from a multi-sensorial perspective and to give thought to both touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision.
Organizers
The lecture series is organized by Professor Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme and hosted by The Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo and the Faculty’s research group Biblical Texts, Cultures and Receptions.
Ancient Adornment Programme - Fall 2024
- Friday September 13 at 3pm (Oslo): Dr. Uroš Matić: “Dress, Adornment and Coloniality of Gender and Desire in New Kingdom Egypt and Nubia”
- Friday September 27 at 3pm (Oslo): Dr. Sarah Hollaender: “Notorious Cross-Dressers? (Re)styling Hercules and Omphale in Roman Antiquity”
- Friday October 11 at 3pm (Oslo): Dr. Bruno Biermann: “Levantine Seals between the Material, Sensory, and the Social: Archaeological, Iconographic, and Exegetical Perspectives on Beauty, Power, and Dress”
- Friday November 1 at 3pm (Oslo): Dr. Susannah Rees: “Eye-paints in the Hebrew Bible: Looking for Meaning”
- Friday November 15 at 3pm (Oslo): Dr. Melanie Wasmuth: “Blossoms for eternity – floral jewellery in ancient Egypt”
- Friday December 6 at 3pm (Oslo): Dr. Laurence Darsigny-Trépanier and Dr. Anne Létourneau: “Bejeweled Biblical Animals: Constructing Gender with Non-Human Bling”