Conférence du Prof. Nikolaos Lazaridis (University of Sacramento)

Since 2001, the North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey team, which is headed by Dr. Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, has been exploring the sandy routes connecting Kharga Oasis to Dakhla Oasis, in Egypt’s western desert. In the course of this survey, our team has discovered numerous lonely rock sites that were used in antiquity as camping spots and stopovers for desert travelers. The epigraphic materials from these sites provide us with valuable information about the ancient uses of these desert routes, ancient traveling practices, as well as the identity and background of the ancient travelers who chose to carve their marks on sandstone rocks. In this lecture, I will discuss several highlights from the ongoing epigraphic investigations in sandstone rock outcrops that lie 20-40 kilometers northwest of the town of El-Kharga. On the rocks’ inscribed surfaces, ancient travelers who traversed this region of the western desert during the pharaonic, Hellenistic, and Roman eras left behind them textual and figural graffiti, in an effort to immortalize their message and to situate their public identity and fleeting presence in relation to the community of desert travelers, to historical and cultural circumstances, as well as to the natural and man-made landscape featured that they encountered in the course of their travels. 

Nikolaos Lazaridis is the Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at California State University Sacramento, where since 2009, he has been teaching courses on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Near East. In 2007, he published his doctoral dissertation on ancient Egyptian and Greek wisdom literature, and since then, he has authored numerous articles on comparative ancient literature, Egyptian and Greek epigraphy, and Egyptian storytelling. Since 2007, he has been conducting fieldwork in Egypt's western desert, as the chief epigrapher of the North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey team, and in 2023, he became the director of Zayan Archaeology, an international project on the site of Qasr el-Zayan in Kharga Oasis. He is currently preparing the monograph The art of ancient Egyptian storytelling and the publication of ancient rock graffiti from Kharga Oasis.