The Future of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife

When:
Wednesday, Mar 11, 2026 6:00p -
7:00p

Where:
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Cambridge, MA 02138

EventScheduled OfflineEventAttendanceMode

Admission:
FREE

Hosted by:
...
hmsc Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

Categories:
History, Lectures & Conferences, University, Virtual

Hybrid Lecture

The Future of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife

Wednesday, March 11, 6:00–7:00 pm ET, Advance registration recommended for online and in-person attendance

Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA


Speaker: Rune Nyord, Associate Professor and Chair, Art History Department, Emory University


Could some of our familiar ideas about the ancient Egyptian afterlife be more Christian than Egyptian? Recent studies suggest that themes we often assume to be central, such as judgment, salvation, and eternal life, were profoundly shaped by the Christian expectations of early Egyptologists. This poses a significant challenge for contemporary Egyptology: how should we think about ancient Egyptian religion when our basic framework has been shaped so strongly by Christianity rather than by Egyptian evidence? Rune Nyord proposes a new way forward that re-centers the social setting of the ancestor cult and considers funerary texts such as the Book of the Dead as ritual texts—continuous with other Egyptian ritual practices—rather than as “guidebooks” to the afterlife.


Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 5:00 pm. Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.


Detail of Hunefer: Papyrus of Hunefer. British Museum, EA9901. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.


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