Abstract
Environmental disasters from ancient Egyptian sources.
Dott. Giuseppina Capriotti, National Research Council of Italy, Institute for Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CNR – ISMA)
Ancient Egyptian culture offers a good example for investigating the relation between environment and civilisation, not only in its social-economic features but also in respect to religious myth. Furthermore, the abundant Egyptian documentation, from both archaeological and literary sources, testifies to a number of catastrophic events and how they were understood in Egyptian royal ideology.
Within the framework of the Research Program called PRIN 2009 (Progetti di rilevante interesse nazionale/Relevant Projects of National Interest), entitled “The seven plagues. Catastrophes and destructions in Palestine and Egypt during the pre-classical period. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, wars, famines and epidemics in the archaeological record and in the Levant and in ancient Egyptian sources: an innovative approach” led by L. Nigro (Sapienza University of Rome), the egyptological research unit of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) has collected Egyptian sources on ancient cataclysms. The CNR unit is a multidisciplinary team where Egyptologist, geographers, geologists and physicists are working together. In this workshop we would like to share our first results with the Egyptian colleagues and to discuss them.
