To kick off our lecture series this year, ARCE DC is pleased to present cutting-edge research that's revolutionizing what we know about the landscape of ancient Egypt, north and south.

This will be offered in two back-to-back talks on the same afternoon. Here are the details—

The Shifting Nile and the Origins of Dynastic Egypt

Saturday, January 25, 2025, at noon (eastern US time) on Zoom

and

Rivers and Climate Change: A Different Picture of Thebes

Saturday, January 25, 2025, at 1:15 pm (eastern US time) on Zoom

The speaker (center) coring sediments in the Nile Delta with a hand auger

The topic (The Shifting Nile)

This presentation focuses on links between climate, the Predynastic landscapes of the Delta, and the emergence of Dynastic Egypt. The speaker’s investigations involved boring into the earth, retrieving cores of soil layers laid down over centuries, and using those to create a radically new picture of what the land looked like in antiquity.

Climate and landscape are important to consider within archaeological change narratives: They can offer opportunities for people, as well as constrain settlement and subsistence choices. Whilst climatic changes played well-known roles in facilitating some of the observed shifts during the Egyptian Neolithic period, the role that environmental change may have played at the dawn of Egyptian history has been overlooked in comparison.

Natural environmental changes taking place in the Nile Delta through the fourth millennium B.C. are argued here to have been a facilitating factor allowing, and possibly stimulating, socioeconomic changes leading to the “Lower Egyptian – Naqada Transition” (circa 3350 B.C.), whereby Upper and Lower Egypt became host to similar material cultures. These interlinked factors, in turn, may have laid the foundations for the emergence of a more unified Egyptian state beginning circa 3100 B.C.

Retrieving a core of drilled sediments within Karnak, by the fourth pylon

The topic (Thebes)

Today, the major archaeological sites of the Theban region sit within a floodplain that is about 10 kilometers/6 miles wide, with the (single-channel) Nile running through the approximate center. Yet in past periods this entire landscape looked very different, hosting multiple branches of the Nile, a floodplain that was sometimes much narrower, and temples in landscape contexts that would be unfamiliar to people today.

The Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Survey, whose work is presented here, has been operating in the Luxor region for more than a decade in order to understand the history of these environments, their climatic drivers, and most importantly, their role within the cosmogonical and functional spaces of the Egyptian religious capital.

Email us at arce.dc.news at gmail dot com for a link to register for these two lectures. You will only need to register once, and you can attend one lecture or both.

Each of these events will last an hour—50 minutes for the lecture, 10 minutes for Q+A.

There will be a 15-minute intermission between the end of the first lecture and the beginning of the second.

The speaker

Dr. Benjamin Pennington is a geoarchaeologist and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, UK, who has worked on a wide variety of archaeological missions across Egypt over the last 13 years. Initially training as a geologist, he then completed his Ph.D. in geography and archaeology, with his main research looking at the interlinkages between the ancient Egyptians, the Nile river, and the floodplain.

With a particular skill set in reconstructing paleolandscapes (landscapes of the past), he has been involved in many projects in different ways, from searching for ancient canals in the Delta to understanding how climatic and human changes could have influenced the Nile's behavior as a whole.