Speaker
Mar 27, 2025: 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Northen Auditorium
Title: Ancient African Queens
Solange Ashby Assistant Professor, Egyptology and Nubian Studies, UCLA
The kingdom of Kush (ancient Nubia) provides an amazing attestation of female power: a series of sole-ruling queens (one of whom led her army in battle against the invading Romans) who ruled in ancient Nubia in the first century BCE and the first century CE. Temple images, funerary chapels, and stone sculptures depict these ruling queens, often in the company of the gods, whether Egyptian (Isis and Horus) or Meroitic (Apedemak and Amesemi). Texts written in the Egyptian and Meroitic scripts accompany scenes in temples and tombs. Golden jewelry and exquisite funerary offerings demonstrate the wealth and power of Meroitic queens during a time when Ptolemaic Greeks and then Romans ruled Egypt.
sponsored by: Classics Dept,, History, Africana Studies