Louis Dautais

Please tell us about your research project.

I am a Dual-PhD Candidate in Egyptology and in Aegean Protohistory between the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (co-supervisor: Dr. Prof. Marc Gabolde, UPVM3-ASM/ENiM, Montpellier - France) and the Université catholique de Louvain (co-supervisor: Dr. Prof. Charlotte Langohr, UCLouvain-INCAL/AegIS, Louvain-la-Neuve - Belgium), started thanks to a PhD fellowship (MESRI-ResEFE 2019-2022) granted by the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO, Cairo) and supported by the École française d’Athènes (EfA, Athens) through two monthly scholarships (2021, 2022).

My doctoral dissertation aims at defining and explain the nature, frequency, intensity and modalities of interactions between Aegeans and Egyptians in their historical contexts from a diachronic perspective during the Late Bronze Age (17th-12th c. BCE). Through the cross-analysis of the textual, iconographic and material (aegyptiaca and protohellenica) evidence of two cultural areas in contact, this research project will ultimately offer an interpretative and nuanced reading of the history of Egypto-Aegean interactions, taking into account their socio-political contexts and opening up new perspectives (i.e. identification of actors, drivers and mechanisms – including cross-craft and cross-cultural transfers). This work will take the shape of an updated chrono-thematic historical synthesis over the long period of six centuries, in the broader context of exchange networks in the Eastern Mediterranean. This work will provide historians and archaeologists with a new understanding of the polymorphous interactions that linked these major civilizations of the Bronze Age.
 

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

I have been awarded the MFO scholarship for the month of March 2023. This journey in Oxford, and more generally in England, allows me to complete several small projects on the archaeological pieces of evidence discussed in my PhD diss. before fully tackling the writing of the latter.

In particular, the aim is to study Minoan and Mycenaean pottery objects kept at the Ashmolean Museum and discovered in the Nile Valley, mostly deposited in funerary contexts, which shed new light on both the synchronised Aegean-Egyptian chronology and on the dynamics of exchanges between the two regions. Indeed, the excavations carried out by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt (BSAE, dir. W.M.F. Petrie) at the turn of the 20th century brought to light several dozen of these objects in well-defined stratigraphic contexts, of which at least fifty have been deposited in the Department of Antiquities of this museum.

Other objects, now lost, were meticulously described and drawn in unpublished handwritten excavation reports that I must consult to contextualise them. This is notably the case of a Mycenaean object discovered during the excavation work carried out in the necropolis of Dra Abu el-Naga in 1899 under the auspices of Lord Northampton, the results of which were recorded in W. Spiegelberg’s Fundjournal, now preserved in the scientific archives of the Griffith Institute. Finally, some excavations carried out by the BSAE, which brought to light Mycenaean sherds, have remained unpublished to this day: Kom el-‘Abd (dir. O.H. Myers, 1936-1937) and Sesebi (dir. H.W. Fairman, 1936-1938). These scientific archives, which I analyse during my stay, are kept at the London office of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Finally, at the heart of the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, the Sackler Library is one of the main ones, and one of the few in the world, in which one can consult all the works published to date on all the themes relating to the Ancient worlds, within which Egypt and the Aegean world have a privileged spot.
 

First impressions of Oxford/the University?

Oxford – the “city of the dreaming spires” – is surely the place of knowledge par excellence, materialised both by the millions of books held in the Bodleian Libraries and by the cosmopolitan people who keep this thousand age-old institution alive. This is confirmed day after day by chance meetings and more formal reunions with colleagues. In addition, the architecture of the city’s numerous buildings (libraries, faculties, colleges and museums – e.g. Duke Humfrey's and Radcliffe Camera Libraries as well as the astonishing Pitt Rivers Museum) reveals an arena for the exchange of ideas at the frontier of knowledge.