Professor of Egyptology at the department of ancient near eastern civilizations.

Research Interests

Trained as a lawyer (LLM from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) and as an Egyptologist, I have published various interdisciplinary researches concerning the ancient Egyptian legal system, its conceptual frame, textual productions, linguistic registers, and legal categorization embedded in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. The study of these scripts and the metaphorical processes they reveal have brought me to investigate the interplay of picture and script in various contexts and to propose new analyses of Egyptian works of art, backed up by Egyptian textual sources. I am now using the same structuralist approach I used in the analysis of ancient Egyptian texts to decrypt pictures of kingship at the times of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. During 2012-2015 I was a member of the research group Picture Power – Cultural Continuity in Changing Worlds at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies. I recently published in the Harvard Egyptological Studies: Renewing Royal Imagery - Akhenaten and Family in the Amarna Tombs.

Teaching

Semiotics of hieroglyphic script and Egyptian art; Middle and Neo-Egyptian languages; ancient Egyptian legal languages and legal system; Egyptian(izing) finds in Israel; Iconography of kingship in Amarna.

Ongoing Projects

• HUJI R&D Award 2022: Atenist Iconographic Patterns: Making Sense of Akhenaten's Imagery. Systematic study of Atenist iconographic patterns in context and assemblages, with an evaluation of the suitability, specifics, and limits of a pattern-based approach to the study of isolated reliefs.

Previous Projects

• ISF Grant 409/18: Cultural Transmission in the Second Millennium BCE: The Contribution of Foreign Artistic Motifs to Pharaoh Akhenaten's Visual Strategy

Publication List

For the full publication list, please enter the following link

Graduate Students

M.A. Students

• Hadas Misgav
• Toam Meir-Weil
• Alexander Vassiliev
• Tamara Mkheidze
• Naomi Gruntman
• Katya Bariudin
• Matan Stein

Ph.D. Students

• Batyah Schachter
• Zhao Zhenxiao