PhD student of Egyptology Dora Goldsmith is offering a fun and educational online workshop this Sunday on the topic of unguent cones in ancient Egypt. Throughout this workshop, participants are going to do a bit of experimental archaeology and will recreate what unguent cones could have looked like in ancient Egypt.
The workshop will take three hours. In the first hour, Dora Goldsmith will give a lecture on the topic of unguent cones including all the written, archaeological, and pictorial evidence. Theory vs. evidence will be discussed: What is just a theory and what do we really have evidence for? What was the exact function of unguent cones? What does the written record concerning the sense of smell tell us about these cones? How does the hieroglyphic script and classifier research assist us in understanding the function of these enigmatic artifacts? In the second hour, Dora Goldsmith will give participants a detailed insight into the ingredients and teach them how to recreate unguent cones. They will do two experiments. These experiments shall demonstrate whether experimental archaeology can
help us in finding out more about ancient Egyptian unguent cones. To see what they are going to make, interested participants can go to: <https://www.academia.edu/41733579/Experiment_Reconstructing_Ancient_Egyptian_Unguent_Cones>
The third hour will be reserved for Q&A.
Ticket fee: 30€
Time and Date: Sunday, May 3, 2020, 6pm-9pm CEST (starting at UK:
5pm; US East coast: 12pm; US West coast: 9am; Australia: 2am)
Location: Zoom
To sign up, send an e-mail to: [email protected]
About Dora Goldsmith’s research:
Dora Goldsmith is a PhD student of Egyptology at the Freie Universität Berlin. The topic of her PhD project is the sense of smell in ancient Egypt, the exact title of her research being *“The Archaeology of Smell in Ancient Egypt. A Cultural Anthropological Study Based on Written Sources”*. Her PhDproject incorporates linguistic and cultural anthropological research. She carries out a semantic field research focusing on ten different words relevant to the sense of smell. The semantic field she works with includes the ancient Egyptians words xnm ‘to smell’, snn or snsn ‘to smell’, sTi ‘scent’, xnm.w ‘fragrance’, id.t ‘perfume’, xnS ‘to stink’, sxnS ‘to make stink’, Sni ‘stench’, bhd ‘scent’ and qn ‘scent of fat’. She records and translates all ancient Egyptian texts including these words, which help her define the role of smells in the ancient Egyptian society.
