The Stephen Glanville Memorial Lecture

[pling]

On Saturday we went to a lecture in Cambridge - every year there's a Stephen Glanville Memorial Lecture on Egyptology, given by some notable person in the field, organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum. Last year was pretty much the sort of thing I'd expected - a talk about Memphis (capital of Egypt in the Old Kingdom period) given by Jaromir Málek,

Comments

[pling]

I certainly agree with your first point, definitely something to be wary of. And I thought it was clear from his talk (& the info I subsequently looked up on wikipedia) that the scholarship had arisen from his activist interest in the subject, which will presumably give him bias towards finding something "good & African" in the Egyptian literature he was studying. But as you say, everyone has some initial reason that draws them to a field of research, we're all biased somehow.

I'm not sure I'd agree with your second point, however. In reality both emotion & intellect come from the brain, but in Western European tradition (and maybe others, but that's mine so I know I can say this) we separate them in our language and metaphor. We say emotion comes from the heart & reason from the head. But if in Ancient Egypt they said that both come from the heart, if they didn't make that distinction between intellect and emotion as separate things from a separate part of oneself (however inaccurate they were about the anatomy), then surely that makes them think about the concepts differently? Or I am wrong in thinking that they also thought emotion came from the heart? (Having just gone & looked at your LJ userinfo, I can see that you know significantly more about this than I do! :) )