Aswan2013

Archaeology & Environment. Understanding the past to design the future. A multidisciplinary approach

About the Workshop

The workshop aims to match Italian and Egyptian scholars in the framework of the research unit "Egyptian curses" ISMA - CNR (PRIN 2009 "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 Biblical and ancient Egyptian sources: an innovative approach”, led by Lorenzo Nigro, Sapienza University of Rome).

Knowing the dynamics of environmental changes and disasters is very important to prevent them. The scholars who study current earthquakes or climatic change are very interested in ancient phenomena.

Ancient Egypt gives us an extraordinary opportunity because of the extended documentation about it. Moreover the relationship between human settlements and water courses is very tight and the ancient Egyptian civilization is one of the most important examples of fruitful connection between man and environment.

The team of the National Research Council of Italy, led by Giuseppina Capriotti sieved and catalogued the Egyptian sources and archaeological records regarding cataclysmic events and famines in ancient Egypt. Matching different data and different expertises aims at identifying historical events and creating an interactive databank. The multidisciplinary team works in an integrated perspective, analysing the data collected also in a Geographical Information System, with the help of advanced technologies as satellite remote sensing.

During the workshop, data gathered by the team will be displayed and discussed, in the light of climatic and geomorphologic studies supported by remote sensing.