Ancient Egyptian Lives – As Revealed by Modern Science

Name: Ancient Egyptian Lives – As Revealed by Modern Science
Start: 2026-02-10T18:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-02-10T19:30:00+00:00
Location: Elmwood Hall

Schedule

Tue Feb 10 2026 at 06:30 pm to 07:30 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

Elmwood Hall | Belfast, NI

Egypt offers a unique opportunity to consider a population that has occupied one land for over 7,000 years, where an unparalleled wealth of palaeopathological, literary and archaeological evidence has survived from antiquity.
Increasingly, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the development and application of scientific and biomedical techniques have provided a unique insight into the world of the ancient Egyptians. Indeed, investigations have revolutionized Egyptology, providing new information about individual lives and trends across all levels of society.
These studies continue to contribute knowledge about disease occurrence, causes of death, details of diet, and living conditions in one of the world’s oldest civilizations. They also illuminate our understanding of religious and funerary beliefs and practices, medical and pharmaceutical treatments, and patterns of ethnicity.
This lecture will trace some of these discoveries, through to current studies that focus on new methods of disease detection and assessing the extent to which periods of climate change in ancient Egypt may have affected disease patterns and the availability of pharmaceutical treatments.
ROSALIE DAVID, OBE, FRSM, FRSA
Professor Rosalie David is Emerita Professor of Egyptology and former Director of the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester. She is also an Honorary Research Associate at The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, and a Vice-President of The Egypt Exploration Society.
A graduate of University College London (BA Hons) and the University of Liverpool (PhD), she has received Fellowships of The Royal Society of Arts and The Royal Society of Medicine and was awarded the OBE for services to Egyptology in the 2003 New Year Honours List. The focus of her career has been the development of an interdisciplinary methodology, incorporating palaeopathological, archaeological and literary evidence, to enhance knowledge about the lives of the ancient Egyptians.