Although there are some statues of Amenemhat III as a young A man, others depict him in later years with large ears and what appears to be a careworn expression. Wolfram Grajetzki continues his series of articles on notable figures from the Middle Kingdom by recounting the life and times of this, the last major king of the Twelfth Dynasty.
Other articles in this edition include a report by Patryk Chudzik on surprising discoveries made by his team under the paving blocks of Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri; a description by Lucy Gordan of a major exhibition in Rome of artefacts loaned by Egyptian museums for the first time; and a proposal by Rosalie David that the medical skills developed in ancient Egypt were communicated via the ancient Romans to the physicians of a small community in medieval Wales. The beautiful photographs of the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb, taken under extremely difficult conditions by Harry Burton, are an invaluable resource, but the man himself received little recognition for his work, as Carmen Ruiz tells us in her article. This issue also contains the final article in our series ‘Milestones in Egyptology’, to be replaced by a new feature in AE 153.
It is with great sadness that I must record the death this October of Dr Robert Morkot. A graduate of UCL, former university lecturer in archaeology, president of the Friends of the Petrie Museum, and a former board member of the EES, his interest lay particularly in the relationship between ancient Egypt and Kush. His two-part investigation into the order of succession of the pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty was published in AE in 2021. He was also the author of two popular books The Black Pharaohs: Egypt’s Nubian Rulers and, jointly with a number of colleagues, Centuries of Darkness (in which he argued the case for an alternative chronology).