Free Hybrid Lecture
Location: Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Speaker: Florence Dunn Friedman, Visiting Scholar, Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University
King Menkaure’s Fourth Dynasty pyramid temples at Giza were once filled with statues. The surviving statues represent some of the finest in ancient Egyptian sculpture. Crafted for eternity, these statues served as “bodies” through which the king could function in this life and the next. The iconography, inscriptions, figural groupings, stances, gestures, and even the damage of these statues have stories to tell. While these stories rarely involved ordinary Egyptians, certain statue details hint at far-reaching economic ties that did. This talk dives into the mysteries behind Menkaure’s sculptures—exploring their symbolism, damage, and relocation—and reveals how much they still have to say, even after thousands of years.
Advance registration is recommended.
Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 4:00 pm. Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
About the Speaker
Florence Dunn Friedman received her PhD in Classical and Oriental Studies at Brandeis University, where her dissertation was On the Meaning of Akh (ȝḫ) [a religious concept] in Egyptian Mortuary Texts. She worked for twenty years at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, where, first as guest lecturer and finally, Curator of Ancient Art, she mounted two federally funded traveling exhibitions and multi-author catalogs: Beyond the Pharaohs: Egypt and the Copts in the 2nd to 7th Centuries A.D., and Gifts of the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Faience. She was adjunct faculty in the Liberal Arts division at RISD and Visiting Scholar and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University, where she continues today as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology. In a seeming detour, she was also an Affiliate Scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute for two years.
While Dr. Friedman’s earlier research focused on the meaning and function of Djoser’ s Step Pyramid Complex, she has in recent years turned to researching and publishing articles on the Menkaure sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. She has also joined several seasons of work with Ancient Egypt Research Associates, headed by Mark Lehner, where she has been working on the statue fragments found in Menkaure’s Valley Temple at Giza.
