Inaugural Lecture - Professor Stephen Quirke

UCL Museums and Collections/ Institute of Archaeology

Monday 23 January 2012 

UCL Archaeology Lecture Theatre G6

Stephen Quirke specialised in reading ancient Egyptian hieratic, the earliest script of handwriting. From 1989 he was curator first for hieratic papyri in the British Museum, joining UCL in 1999 as curator for the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and lecturer in the Institute of Archaeology. With Mark Collier he published the UCL Lahun Papyri (2002-2006, 3 vols.); his most recent book is Hidden Hands: Egyptian workforces in Petrie excavation archives 1880-1924.

Object of Egypt: Outside the Time Frame

Over formative centuries of modernity, certain Things were renamed antiquities, and became dominant Object of a new collecting institution, the Museum, in emerging nation-states. By delivering acts of discovery, a young discipline called archaeology, inside the post-Humboldt university, achieved its mission - to create a new Time. Yet these institutions remained as unstable as their nationstates, and Museum inmates subversively resist their labels. The January 25th 2011 revolution in Egypt may radically transform Archive and Object. Outside a self-appointed metropolis such as London, other histories may take hold both within Egypt, urban and rural, and across Europe, south and north.