Rune Nyord

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.

Hybrid Lecture March 11 6:00pm EST Rune Nyord "The Future of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife" @harvardmuseums.bsky.social hmsc.harvard.edu/calendar_eve...
@runenyord.bsky.social

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Interdisciplinary Egyptology Vol. 2 No. 2 (2025) journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/in... #openaccess Egyptology in Dialogue: Historical bodies in relations, comparisons, and negotiations @runenyord.bsky.social @leireolabarria.bsky.social @edwardscrivens.bsky.social @emilywhitehead.bsky.social

During my visit to California this weekend, this lecture at Berkeley was recorded and is now up on YouTube. In it, I present an overview of the argument in my book “Yearning for Immortality” along with some pointers for new directions for studies of Egyptian mortuary religion.

The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife - The Ancient Near East Today We often imagine the ancient Egyptians as obsessed with death and the afterlife. But what if the familiar story of judgment and salvation owes more to modern ideas than ancient ones?

The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife - The Ancient Near East Today
anetoday.org/european-egy...

Double sided icon (Athens, Greece) A double sided icon from Egypt with St Paul on one side and an unidentified saint on the other. 7th-8th c. Housed in the Benaki Museum, Athens. For more photos, travel, and religion, follow me on Blu...

A double sided icon from Egypt with St Paul on one side and an unidentified saint on the other. (honestly, I'm not sure which side this is.). 7th-8th c. Housed in the Benaki Museum, #Athens.

📷🇬🇷 flic.kr/p/2rvYZMo

#photography
#Byzantine
#Greece
#saints
#museum

Yes, he does indeed look very unusual. As you can see, Drandaki does cite a couple of parallels, suggesting that the scrolls are a reference to the Pauline epistles. But if it wasn’t for the inscription, I probably wouldn’t have guessed this identity!

Thank you for sharing this piece! The inscription on the side shown here identifies the figure as St Apa Stephanos, so St Paul must be on the other side. There is more information on the icon in this article: dx.doi.org/10.26247/aur...

The full woodcut of 1529 of the cruciform sundial can be seen.

A finished version of the cruciform sundial.

In 1529, Georg Hartmann of Nuremberg made this woodcut, a cruciform #sundial, establishing a market for #DIY paper instruments.

For those interested in assembling Hartmann's paper cruciform sundial at home or in a history seminar, here is a link:

www.kartonmodellbau.org/cgi-bin/boge...

Ancient Egyptian Epigraphy and Palaeography - The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy.

Have you looked at Ricardo Caminos’s overview of 19th- and 20th-century methods in Egyptological epigraphy in this book? www.metmuseum.org/met-publicat... — it probably doesn’t mention eyebrow pencils, though!

Stories that are out of this world: Books in brief Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Delighted to see Yearning for Immortality featured in Nature’s “Books in brief” this morning: doi.org/10.1038/d415...

Check out these new #OpenAccess books by @emorycollege.bsky.social authors 🌸 bit.ly/4ijKCd8

"Yearning for Immortality" - @runenyord.bsky.social @uchicagopress.bsky.social
"Unsettling Acts" - Jieun Lee @ohiostatepress.bsky.social
"Living and Dying in São Paolo" - Jeff Lesser @dukepress.bsky.social

@yaelrice.bsky.social and I co-authored this piece precisely to combat misguided work like this so people don't have to constantly rehearse the arguments about why it's specious. We laid it all out here for you!

hyperallergic.com/604897/how-s...

Happening today at 4pm! RSVP now to join us in celebrating "Yearning for Immortality" by @runenyord.bsky.social: forms.office.com/r/D6eAJ7vtAm

In this @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Miranda Melcher about my book “Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife”. You can listen to it at newbooksnetwork.com/yearning-for...

For those in Atlanta, the Fox Center is organising a book launch next week where I will be discussing “Yearning for Immortality” with two brilliant colleagues:

I might be able to help with this (depending on precise timing, etc.)

Yes, though I wonder just how much that impacted the European discourse directly - I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this when you’ve had a chance to read the book. Internal European schisms such as the Reformation or the rise of the anthropocentric afterlife seem more influential.

The book deals with the early modern and 19th-century European discourse on interpreting ancient Egyptian mortuary religion, which ends up feeding directly into the modern (Egyptological and popular) understanding. This is the context in which I use the notion of “colonisation”.

Ah, I understand. I am using the language here to contrast with the conceptual colonisation of the ancient religion by Christian concepts and frameworks. I don’t think the call to return to the sources here aligns particularly with nationalist agendas, but thank you for pointing out this issue.

Thank you! Since the core issue of the discourse is ancient Egyptian ideas, “indigenous” is used here to designate sources and concepts from that context (as opposed both to ancient Greek or Roman and later European ones). “Indigenous and coeval” might have been more precise, if a little unwieldy.

Thank you!

It is a great pleasure to announce that my book Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife is now available in Open Access: bit.ly/3Xn9HfB

Please download, read, and share with anyone who might be interested in new ways of thinking about Egyptian religion.

Screenshot from The Guardian's UK website this morning, under the category 'Egypt', a headline reading 'Smell like an Egyptian: researchers sniff ancient mummies to study preservation'

Hello @theguardian.com, this isn't news about Egypt, as your website categorizes it: it's news about Western scientists using colonial collections in Western museums to do to the ancestral Egyptian dead what they have done for centuries: promote themselves and grab headlines. 🧵📜🏺🗃️

An open cardboard box containing copies of Rune Nyord’s book Yearning for Immortality.

It’s here! Thrilled to have just received a stack of copies of my new book Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife. The official publication date (also for the Open Access version) is March 5, but UCP is already filling preorders: bit.ly/41cbSVO. #acrel

In which I question the oft-repeated claim that artistic intervention puts the past and present into dialogue. But which pasts? To what ends? Based on interviews with curators & artists, and reflections on not the end product but the process.

“Taking Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion Seriously”: Why Would We, and How Could We? - Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 17 (March 2018) Ancient Egyptian mortuary religion is full of ideas which, in their conventional Egyptological interpretation, are very difficult to take s...

Yes, it is not entirely by accident that Egyptian afterlife beliefs seem so oddly "Victorian"! The book is currently in press, but I wrote a preliminary paper that might be of interest (though I hadn't realized at the time just how deep historical root the ideas have): bit.ly/4acz5d3

But by the time the Book of the Dead entered the picture, there was already a deeply entrenched tradition of understanding Egyptian mortuary religion as focused on judgement with resulting rewards and punishments in the afterlife, based on creative readings of authors like Herodotus and Diodorus.

Exactly, the weighing motif looked (and still looks!) a lot like the psychostasis familiar from Christian art with St. Michael weighing the souls at the Last Judgement, so it stood to reason that the rest of the Book of the Dead similarly depicted episodes of a personal, transcendent afterlife.

*certainly

(as shown also by the fact that it was taken long before the decipherment of hieroglyphs)