How did the Ancient Egyptians experience their natural landscapes? A journey to mountains and caves

It is well known that the ancient Egyptian perception of the world was highly influenced by Egypt’s natural environment. The country’s geographical features and phenomena were mythologised and integrated into the overall world view. This paper is drawn from a broader research project concerning ancient Egyptians’ awareness and understanding of their surrounding landscape, as well as its exploitation, and how their religious interpretations of these phenomena exemplify the interplay of geography and religion. Apart from a general introduction to the project, the talk will present first results of the study, focusing on mountains and caves. Various lemmata used by the Egyptians to designate both natural features are introduced and their usage explained. The latter will not only outline the chronological development of these terms, but also whether some words refer to religious aspects connected to a specific geographical feature of a mountain or a cavern. An examination of classifiers (determinatives) for these lemmata, which reveal how ancient Egyptians observed these features and codified this knowledge in their language, is included as well.

About the speaker:

Christina Geisen is an affiliated lecturer at the Archaeology Department of the University of Cambridge, UK. Her current research focuses on ancient Egyptian ritual texts, the materiality of the Book of the Dead, as well as the interplay of geography and religion. She holds a Magister Artium in Egyptology, Islamic Studies (minor) and Pre- and Early History (minor) from the University of Bonn, Germany, and a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Toronto, Canada. Before her position at Cambridge, she was a Lecturer at the University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at Yale University, USA, and a Departmental Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Oxford, UK, where she replaced Richard B. Parkinson.