Spotlight Lecture: Deir el Medina community and the elite Theban Necropolis during the 18th dynasty

This Tuesday Spotlight lecture closes our wider theme of 'Visualising Egypt' explores the diversity and complexity of Egyptian art and how it has inspired contemporary artists.

Because of the contiguity of the settlement of artists and workmen in the site nowadays known as Deir el-Medina and the nearby world-famous elite cemetery of the Theban Necropolis, it has often been assumed — implicitly or explicitly — that the former were the (most) plausible makers of the latter. The lecture will question this assumption, addressing the issue of “who made the private tombs of Thebes?” (Romer 1994), with a special focus on the situation of the 18th dynasty.

Dimitri Laboury is Research Director of the F.R.S.-FNRS, the National Foundation for Scientific Research of Belgium, at the University of Liège, where he teaches as professor of ancient Egyptian art history and archaeology. Thanks to a research incentive grant of the F.R.S.-FNRS, his main current research project is devoted to the study of painters and painterly practices in the Theban Necropolis, and, more broadly, artists in ancient Egyptian society.

[lievenmoelants]

If they could not paint the elite tombs by lack of artistic accomplishments, how could they be able to paint the kings tombs? Must we not conclude that they were the builders, not the decorators of the kings tombs? Greetings from Aarschot.