Archaeology Lecture with Robyn Price

Robyn Price will speak on "Cultivating the Senses: Gardens and Sensory Indulgence in Ancient Egypt". Lunch will be served at 12:00pm and the lecture will begin at 12:30pm. 

Lecture abstract:

The term “garden” in ancient Egypt encompassed a remarkable range of spaces, from modest household plots to temple precincts, tomb courtyards, and expansive royally managed fields. Modern scholarship has often imposed functional or locational taxonomies, such as food gardens, pleasure gardens, or funerary gardens, that may obscure how these spaces actually overlapped in practice and meaning. Drawing on archaeological remains, textual references, artistic depictions, and ethnobotanical studies, I reconsider the garden as a locus of sensory indulgence in New Kingdom Egypt. At Amarna and beyond, gardens were not limited to agricultural production but created environments of shade, fragrance, sound, and visual delight that equated sensory stimulation with life itself. Accessible across social strata, gardens manifested nourishment, pleasure, health, and divine presence, serving both the living and the dead. By reframing gardens as sites where cultivation embodied cultural values of sensing and being, I argue that their purpose extended well beyond subsistence to encompass the very experience of living.