Lectures

LECTURES IN INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS: (PARTIAL LIST)

October 1990: ‘Grammar and Registers in Literary Late-Egyptian.’ In:  Crossroad II, Conference on Egyptian Grammar, UCLA.

September 1991: ‘The Ramesside Literary Letter of Menna to his Disloyal and Defiant Son.’ In:  VI th Congress of Egyptology, Turin.

May 1994: ‘Remarks on Some Semiotic Peculiarities of the Hieroglyphs.’ In: Crossroad III, Conference on Egyptian Grammar, Yale.

September 1995: ‘Determinatives as Representatives of Conceptual Structures. The Case of the Itn 'sun disk.' In:  VIIth Congress of Egyptology. Cambridge, England.

September 1997: Invited lecture: ‘Hoch- und Altagssprache in Ramessidischer Zeit.’ In: Textcorpus und Wörterbuch. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin.

October 1998: Invited lecture: ‘The Determinative System in Old and Middle Egyptian - A Theoretical Layout.’ In:   Classification and Categorization in Ancient Egypt.  Seminar für Aegyptologie und Koptologie, Göttingen.

March 1999: Invited lecture: ‘The Icon in the Role of Classifier: The Semiotics of the Egyptian Determinatives System.’ In:  The Multiple Origin of Writing: Image Symbol and Script. Centre for Ancient Studies, The University of Pennsylvania.

July  1999: Invited lecture:  ‘The Hieroglyphic Origin of the Alphabet’ In: The Origin of The Alphabet. Tel Aviv University.

October 1999:  ‘The Role of Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Indoctrination and Maintenance of Ideology.’ In: 7th Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Dresden.

October 2000: Invited lecture:   ‘On the Ill-mannered Behaviour of Apophis. A New Perspective on a Ramesside Tradition’ In: Cultural Interference and the Hyksos. University of Vienna.

December 2002: Invited lecture:   ‘Prototypes and Covert Categories in the Egyptian Script’ In: I filosofi e la scrittura egiza. Dipartimento di Scienze Antropologiche e Storico-Territoriali, Università di Torino. Torino.

September 2003:  ‘Metaphors and Categorization in Ancient Egypt.’  In:  Metaphor, Categorization and Abstraction. 5th International Conference of Researching and Applying Metaphor.  Paris.

April 2004: Invited lecture:   ‘Classification in the Ancient Egyptian Script.’ Brown University, Department of Egyptololgy. Providence.

September 2005: Invited lecture:   ‘Why Determinatives are Classifiers’ In: “After Polotsky”. New Research and Trends in Egyptian and Coptic Linguistics. Bonn University. Bonn.

January 2006 – Invited lecture:   ‘A Canaanite Reading of Egyptian Hieroglyphs’ In: Grenzbereiche der Schrift, Altägyptische Wörterbuch, Berlin.

January 2007: Invited lecture: ‘La sémiologie de l'écriture égyptienne’ Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris.

January-February 2007 - Invited lecture series “quatre leçons”, Collège de France, Paris:

L´archéologie de la pensée égyptienne: Classification et categories des Anciens Egyptiens

November 2007: Invited lecture: ‘The Invention of the Alphabet in Sinai’, Harvard University, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC). Cambridge.

September 2008: ‘Are 'Determinatives' Actual 'Classifiers'? A Case Study in a Multidimensional Approach of the Egyptian “Determinatives”.’ (Orly Goldwasser, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & Colette Grinevald, University of Lyon). University of Canterbury.

October 2008: ‘Formes linguistiques et catégories sémantiques: le cas des hieroglyphs classificateurs de l'écriture égyptienne’ (avec Colette Grinevald, Université de Lyon et Danièle Dubois, CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI). ACI, Paris.

February 2009: Invited lecture: ‘The Archaeology of the Ancient Egyptian Mind’ Harvard University, Boston.

March 2009: ‘The Life Story of the Ancient Egyptian Classifier System - The Birth of a System’. Workshop: The Diachrony of Classification Systems. NIAS, Wassenaar, Netherlands.

December 2009: ‘Setting Expectations – A Discourse-Role of Classifiers in the Hieroglyphic Script’ Conference: Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian. Liege.

June 2010:  Invited lecture: ‘A Media Revolution Born in the Desert: The Invention of the Alphabet’. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

May 2011: Lecture: ‘The Dream of Haremhab.’ In: Symposium on: Haremhab: General and King of Egypt, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

April 2012: Invited lecture: ‘Innovations on the Fringe of Culture – On the Invention of the Alphabet in Sinai.’ OREA, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna.

April 2012:  Invited lecture: ‘The Date of the Invention of the Alphabet.’ Brown University, Providence.

April 2012: Lecture: ‘What are Determinatives Good for?.’ In: American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting, Providence.

July 2012: Invited Lecture: ‘The Archaeological Context of the Invention of the Alphabet. ’ Institut für Orientalistik, Vienna University. Vienna.

November 2012: Lecture: (with Colette Grinevald). ‘Graphemic Classification vs. Morphemic Classification.’ In: Dynamique du Langage (DDL), Université Lyon 2. Lyon.

February 2013: Lecture: ‘A Proof for Covert Categories in the Human Mind.’ École normale supérieure - COLLEGIUM DE LYON, Lyon.

June 2013: Invited lecture: ‘Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs as a Window into the Mind.’ The Edmund & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences- Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation Seminar, Edmund J. Safra Campus, Jerusalem. 

January 2014: Lecture: ‘At the Crossroad of Gender and Classifier in Ancient Egyptian -1st Person Case.’ In: Workshop: Gender and Classifiers - Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, University of Surrey.

May 2014: Invited lecture: (with Henri Brice): ‘Hieroglyphs and the Brain: Cognitive Processes in Hieroglyphic Readings.’ In:  Peirce, Hieroglyphs, and Multimodality, Humboldt Universität, Berlin.

September 2014: Lecture: ‘The Role of Objects in the Invention of the Alphabet: A View from the Museum.’ In: Department of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

November 2014: Invited lecture: ‘”What is a Horse?”: From Umberto Eco to Hieroglyphs.’ In: Frühe Konzepte von Mensch und Natur: Universalität, Spezifität, Tradierung, Ägyptologie, Institut für Altertumswissenschaften, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität. Mainz.

April 2015, Invited lecture: ‘Akhenaton and the Origin of Monotheistic Tendencies in Egypt.’ In:  Maimonides Lectures. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna. 

February 2016, Berlin.  Selz, G., O. Goldwasser and C. Grinevald. ‘The Question of Sumerian Determinatives: Inventory, Classifier Analysis, and Comparison to Egyptian Classifiers.’ In:  ‘Crossroads: Whence and Whither?’ 17-20 February, 2016. Berlin.

July 2016, Basel. 'Iconicity vs. Liniarity. The Advantage of a System  without Systematicity.'  In: The Idea of Writing, Writing as a System: Emergence, Variation, Performance’. NCCR Eikones, University of Basel. 

October 2016, Animal Classification in Ancient Near Eastern Scripts: Hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, and Luwian Hieroglyphs. Yale University. 

May 2018, “Is there an ANIMAL in the Ancient Near East?” Monday, May 14th, 16:15, Gilman Building 281, Tel Aviv University, at the department seminar of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University, “Wild and Tame: Human-Animal Interaction in the Ancient World.”

July 2018, "Alphabets as "Disruptive Technology" in the Ancient Near East."  At The annual conference of the International Association for Assyriology,
Innsbruck, Austria on July 16th through 20th, 2018. 

March 2019, "Disruptive Innovation טכנולוגיה משבשת," given at Nadav Ne'eman .    

March 2019, "Was there an 'animal' in Ancient Egypt." At « Appréhender les catégories zoologiques dans les sociétés du passé : sources, méthodes, usages » Vendredi et Samedi 22 – 23 mars 2019. Centre de Recherches Egyptologiques de la Sorbonne (CRES) - Faculté des Lettres de Sorbonne Université.

March 2019. (With Haleli Harel and Dmitry Nikolaev.)  ‘Mapping the ancient Egyptian mind: Introducing iClassifier, a new platform for systematic analysis of classifiers in Egyptian and beyond’, at: Ancient Egypt and New Technology: The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and other Digital Humanities in Egyptology. An international conference to be held 29–30 March 2019 at Indiana University – Bloomington. 

April 2019. (With Haleli Harel and Dmitry Nikolaev.) ‘iClassifier – A digital tool for systematic classifier analysis of classifier languages and scripts.’  Talk given at: ‘Noun categorization: from grammar to communicative interaction.’ Lyon (DDL research center) – April 18–19, 2019. 

November 2019, (Invited public lecture). "The Invention of the Alphabet from Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Media Revolution in the Desert of Sinai (ca. 1840 BCE)," at:  Facultat de Filologia, Universitat de Barcelona, November 28, 2019.  

December 2019, (with Haleli Harel). “The classification of borrowed compound proper names in hieratic: A case study by the digital iClassifier.” Talk at: Ägyptologische „Binsen“-Weisheiten IV - Hieratic of the New Kingdom, 11 December 2019.  https://en.aku.uni-mainz.de/aegyptologische-binsen-weisheiten/ 

April 2021, (Invited keynote lecture). "Classifiers as a ‘priming’ device," in ‘Language, semantics and cognition: Saying and conceptualizing the world from Ancient Egypt to Modern Times,’ Yale University. https://egyptology.yale.edu/conferences/current-conferences/conference-program 

April 2021, (Invited public lecture). What Makes a Great Invention? The Invention of the Alphabet in the Sinai Desert C. 1840 BCE.  The 10th S.M.A.R.T. Lecture, Ce-M-M Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Science
https://cemm.at/news/n/10th-cemm-smart-lecture-with-prof-orly-goldwasser

Goldwasser, Orly & Yanru Xu. "Ancient Chinese and Ancient Egyptian Scripts – New Comparative Interdisciplinary Research."
13th International Congress of Egyptology, Leiden, August 2023.