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Martin Bommas

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Martin Bommas
Bommas at Radio Cairo
Born1967 (age 56–57)
Academic background
Alma materHeidelberg University
Academic work
DisciplineEgyptology and archaeology
Sub-discipline
Institutions

Martin Bommas (born 1967) is a German Egyptologist, archaeologist, and philologist. He is Professor and Museum Director at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the Director of the Qubbet el-Hawa Research Project (QHRP) in Aswan, Egypt. Prior to his position at Macquarie, he studied Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg (MA 1994; PhD 2000), was Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Basel (2004-2006) and the University of Zurich (2005), Senior Lecturer and Reader in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham (2006-2014; 2014-2018), and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (2014-2018). In addition to his work at Qubbet el-Hawa, he has been involved in archaeological projects at Elephantine and Thebes in Egypt, and Karakorum in Pakistan. He has discovered and published Egyptian papyrus collections in Heidelberg, The Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Nicholson Collection in Sydney. In the museum sector, he contributed to the establishment the Archaeological Museum at Elephantine (1995-1998) and worked as Curator of the Eton Myers Collection at the University of Birmingham (2010-2018).

Since his involvement in archaeological fieldwork in 1989, Martin’s research has examined the Old and Middle Kingdom settlement remains and the 18th Dynasty temple of Khnum at Elephantine, as well as the Old and Middle Kingdom Lower Necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa. His research interests also encompass ancient Egyptian mortuary liturgies, rituals and religious texts spanning the Old Kingdom to the Christian era. Martin has also taught extensively, covering topics of Egyptian religious beliefs and practices, the Egyptian language (all phases) and texts, the Egyptian Mysteries in Greece and Rome, and archaeology. As a museum director, his focus is on historical anthropology, decolonisation and the repatriation of stolen artefacts.

Academic career

Martin Bommas studied Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Leiden. After having worked at the Karakorum Highway in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and the Hindukush in 1989, he started excavating in Egypt the same year. At age 23, and during the First Kuweit War, he became field director of the German Archaeological Institute's mission on the island of Elephantine in Aswan. In his PhD thesis he reconstructed the Temple of Khnum of the 18th Dynasty at Elephantine. Other major projects before 2009 include both the reconstruction and re-building of the monumental gate of Amenhotep II and Ptolemy I which once stood in the southern temenos wall of the temple of Satet, and the discovery of a First Intermediate Period/ Middle Kingdom settlement north of the Sanctuary of Heqaib. From 2015 he has directed the joint University of Birmingham Egypt Exploration Society "Qubbet el-Hawa Research Project" (QHRP) in Aswan.[1] In 2016, he won the Luxor Times Top 10 Discoveries Award after QHRP discovered the causeway of Sarenput I. [2]


He started working on religious texts at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, studying the early New Kingdom Papyrus Leiden I 346 (published 1999). In 1998, he published the long lost fragments of the magical Papyrus Harris 501 he had discovered in the Von-Portheim Stiftung, Heidelberg. Between 1994 and 2001 he worked as a senior research fellow in the DFG funded research project "Altägyptische Totenliturgien" directed by Jan Assmann, published between 2001 and 2008 in three volumes. Amongst his recent philological monographs is the reconstruction of the Ancient Egyptian Ritual of Investiture (2013).

Since 1998 and after having travelled for many years in Greece, Turkey and Italy, he published widely on the development of the Cult of Isis and Egyptian gods in the Mediterranean, focusing on de-coding the mysteries-related rituals based on archaeological artefacts.

In 2013 he was a Research Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University in Washington DC He was the editor-in-chief of the Egypt Exploration Society's Journal of Egyptian Archaeology between 2014 and 2018, and he has been a member of the society since 1995. He is also the editor of the Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity (CMHA) series from Bloomsbury Publishing.[3]

Between 2016 and 2017 he joined the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Villa in Malibu, where in 2017 he discovered a large collection of unpublished hieratic papyri, mainly stemming from the Book of the Dead.


Teaching and current position

After finishing his PhD in Heidelberg in 2000, he became assistant professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He also taught in Heidelberg (1988-2001), Rome (2003), Zurich (2005-2006), Sheffield (2006), and Venice (2008) . Between 2006 and 2018, he taught Egyptology[4] at the University of Birmingham, UK.

He was the Curator of the Eton Myers Collection of Egyptian Art at the University of Birmingham between 2006 and 2018.[5] As part of his work at the collection, he published on the topic of Mummy Wrappings and the Book of the Dead.[6]

In 2018, he was appointed Professor and Director of the Museum of Ancient Cultures, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Martin Bommas (co-)published and edited more than 15 books and 106 articles in peer-reviewed international publications in English, German, and Italian.

Media

Dr Bommas has participated in various media productions, such as The Verb with Ian McMillan, Jenny Uglow, Julian Glover, Amy Cooke-Hodgson and Rachel Parris.[7] In 2016, he was featured with Dr Eman Khalifa on Radio Cairo's World of Info. Presenting new discoveries made by the QHRP at Qubbet el-Hawa, both were featured in the UK national TV channel Channel 5 series "Egyptian Tomb Hunting with Tony Robinson", shown on 27 and 28 November 2018.

References

  1. ^ "Qubbet el-Hawa Research Project". Ees.ac.uk. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
  2. ^ "Causeway discovered in ancient Aswan tomb - Ancient Egypt - Heritage - Ahram Online". English.ahram.org.eg. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
  3. ^ "Bloomsbury - Cultural Memory and History in Antiquity". Bloomsbury.com. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
  4. ^ "Dr Martin Bommas - Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology - University of Birmingham". Birmingham.ac.uk. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
  5. ^ "Eton Myers artefacts at the University of Birmingham". Birmingham Egyptology. 31 January 2013. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
  6. ^ Bommas, Martin. "Four examples of mummy wrappings with depictions from the Book of the Dead in the Cadbury Research Library" (PDF). Birmingham Egyptology. University of Birmingham. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  7. ^ BBC. "The Memory Verb, The Verb - BBC Radio 3". BBC. BBC. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
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