Our April talk took place on Zoom on Sunday 7 April, 15.00 BST, with Dr Nora Shalaby. The talk was preceded by the Essex Egyptology Group’s Annual General Meeting.
The Abydos Temple Paper Archive Project (ATPA) is an international mission under the auspices of University of California Berkeley and in collaboration with the Ministry of Antiquities, Egypt, with members from several countries, including many Egyptian team members.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Antiquities Endowment Fund administered through the American Research Center in Egypt, we are currently working on a recently discovered historical archive containing documents from the Egyptian Antiquities’ Service related to the heritage management of the site of Abydos and surrounding areas, from approximately 1850 through the 1960’s.
Our focus is to preserve and categorize this historical archive detailing the modern history of the area and its archaeological sites from the Egyptian point of view. Considering the many recent projects that have investigated foreign involvement in early Egyptian archaeology, we believe that the Abydos Temple Paper Archive serves as an important counterpoint that can elucidate the contributions of the many Egyptian archaeologists that took part in early explorations.
Dr Nora Shalaby completed her PhD in 2016 at the Freie Universität Berlin on a lithic assemblage from the site of Wadi Maghara. Previously she worked as a Senior Project Assistant in the Egyptian Museum Database and Registrar Training Project. She has excavated in several sites in Egypt including Luxor, Tell el-Daba and Islamic Cairo, and Amara West in Sudan.