Conférence : Egyptian glass production and trade between the seventh century BC and the ninth century AD
Conférence : Goldmining in Ptolemaic Egypt
Marie-Dominique Nenna
Thomas Faucher
3-4 Octobre 2022
Mineral resources, rocks, ore, minerals played a major role in the emergence and development of a centralized and powerful Egyptian state, from the 4th millennium BC to the Ptolemaic and Roman times. In the 4th millennium, imported minerais – obsidian, amazonite, lapis-lazuli – are closely associated to the emergence of social complexity, in the Naqada III period. Later on, in Dynastic Egypt, raw materials have been massively used for large architectural structures while luxury goods made use of rare minerals and precious metals, either mined locally or imported from remote sources. In the 4th century BC, Ptolemalc Egypt opens on a globalized world, spanning trom the Mediterranean basin towards Central Asia and new materials, unused in Dynastic Egypt – as for instance white marble – appear in country.
The conference aims at exploring the procurement, trade, use and value of all kinds of minerals and manmade products derived from minerals, such as glass, in Egypt, Sudan, and the Ptolemaic kingdom. The proposed approach is multidisciplinary as the study of procurement, sourcing and use of minerals gathers specialists from different research fields – archaeology, archaeometry,history, art history philology, etc.