Facing the Ancient Egyptians: Art and Imagination

The first lecture will be at 2.30pm at the Museu do Traje in São Bras de Alportel, the second lecture will be at 6pm at the Convento de São José in Lagoa.

In this lecture, Dr Campbell Price will be talking about ancient Egyptian images and new ways in which they may be interpreted. The Ancient Egyptians are immediately recognisable from their art. Unlike many other cultures of the past, Egyptian faces are so distinctively made-up and framed by wigs and regalia that they would be difficult to confuse with any other people on earth.

Pharaonic art represented a highly stylised and codified way of rendering forms and did not reflect the world as it necessarily appeared. In the lecture, Campbell will be drawing on new research at the University of Manchester on the subjectivities of experiencing the human face and suggest alternative means of reading the images.

Dr Campbell Price is Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, one of the UK’s largest Egyptology collections. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool and was Chair of the EES Board of Trustees from 2021 to 2025. He is the author of several books, most recently Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt (Orion, 2024) and (with Stephanie Boonstra) Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries (Egypt Exploration Society, 2025). He comments regularly on Egyptological topics for TV and audio.

Non-members are welcome to attend AAA lectures for a 5-euro admission fee, with all money raised by the AAA being used for archaeological grants and speakers. For more information, contact info.algarvearqueo@gmail.com, visit arquealgarve.weebly.com or Facebook “Algarve Archaeological Association”. Please check the website or Facebook page for any last-minute changes.

By Jane Robertson