Name: Weinberg Lecture, “Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches”
Start: 2026-03-01T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-03-01T15:30:00-05:00
Location: 2110 Blue Ridge Rd., Raleigh, NC, United States, North Carolina 27607

$Weinberg Lecture, \u201cRecycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches\u201d$

In this lecture Kara Cooney, professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA, discusses her latest book, Recycling for Death, a meticulous study of the social, economic, and religious significance of coffin reuse during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods.
Funerary datasets are the chief source of social history in Egyptology, but the numerous tombs, coffins, Books of the Dead, and mummies of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Dynasties have not been fully utilized as social documents. This is mostly because the data of this time period is scattered and difficult to synthesize. This book is the culmination of 15 years of coffin study, analyzing coffins and other funerary equipment of elites from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-Second Dynasties to provide essential windows into social strategies and adaptations employed during the Bronze Age collapse and subsequent Iron Age reconsolidation.