CMES Research Seminar: Scripture and Scholarship - The Swedish Search for Ancient Egypt, 1677–1739

This seminar will present a new research project named Scripture and Scholarship: The Swedish Search for Ancient Egypt, 1677 – 1739, funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project is first to explore the different roles and meanings given to Ancient Egypt, based on texts like travelogues, chronicles, dream books, dissertations and novels, in Swedish culture and scientific thinking. Central are four Swedish scientific expeditions to Egypt in the beginning of the eighteenth century. European expeditions to Egypt were very unusual at the time.

The main purpose of the project is to analyze how Swedish scholars came to understand and renegotiate the Biblical time regime in relation to new Egyptian chronologies based on different Greco-Roman, Arabic and European intellectual traditions/readings. The project contributes to the field of global history and the discussion of the compression of time and space that followed by the European discoveries of non-Christian civilizations, their chronologies, and concepts of history. In the case of Ancient Egypt, scholars like Joseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609), even argued that the Egyptian dynasty was older than the biblical story of the creation. 

Joachim Östlund is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in History at Lund University. He has published books and articles on early modern Mediterranean history, on topics slavery, cultural encounters, history of science and diplomatic history.

Hybrid Seminar

The talk is held at CMES, Finngatan 16 in Lund. If you are not able to attend in-person, there is an option to attend via Zoom. Please register here for Zoom attendance: https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5wvf--ppj0pHdQ-7CcMp-BNiiHSLwvcRF6q

This event is part of the spring 2023 CMES seminar series. For more information see the full program: