I am very pleased to report that my book Archaeology of Empire in Achaemenid Egypt is expected to be published in November, 2019!
Upcoming lecture at the Met
Next Friday I will be giving a talk at the Met Fellows Spring Colloquium session Bridging Eurasia. The talk is entitled “The Stepchild’s Stepchild: Displaying Ancient Iran in the Modern Museum,” and it reflects some of the challenges of presenting ancient Iranian art in museums. Admittedly it will be a rough, preliminary look at the topic, based on my own impressions and experiences rather than on a rigorous study of the subject.
The session takes place in the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall in the Uris Center for Education on the ground floor of the Met. The colloquium begins at 10:00, and my panel starts at 11:45.
Our article on the Getty’s Urartian belt
The study I have co-authored with Alexis Belis on the Urartian belt in the J. Paul Getty Museum and its relevance for the history of the ‘Parthian shot’ — both as a motif and as a military tactic — has been accepted for publication in the Getty Research Journal 12 (to be published in 2020). We are now finalizing the text and figures.
Upcoming lecture at UC Irvine
On March 11 I will be presenting at the second Payravi Conference on Ancient Iranian History at the University of California, Irvine’s Jordan Center for Persian Studies. The theme of the conference is “The Persian-Achaemenid Empire as a ‘World-System’: New Approaches & Contexts,” and my talk addresses the Achaemenid Empire and Africa. It will include discussion of tribute, diplomacy, ideology and the Red Sea canal, though I am still working out the details.
As I have noted here before I am moving away from the study of Egypt; accordingly, I expect this presentation, and any publication that may result from it, to be my last remarks on the subject for some time. That said, I have no idea where my career will take me next, and it is entirely possible that I will find it expedient or worthwhile to return to Egypt at some point. But now that my book is in press I am running out of things to say about it, while the allure of the Iranian Iron Age only grows stronger (I love a good beaked pitcher).