In the Shadow of the Palace: The non-elite community of Deir el-Ballas as revealed by the settlement remains and tombs
Sunday, June 22, 2025, 3 PM PDT
This virtual lecture will be recorded for later posting on the chapter’s YouTube channel.

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About the Lecture:

The site of Deir el-Ballas played a major role in the birth of the New Kingdom as a royal campaign headquarters of the Theban kings during their ultimately successful wars to expel the Hyksos. For several generations afterwards (c. 1550-1450 BC), a non-elite population lived in the shadow of the abandoned palace in this provincial town. Deir el-Ballas was excavated on behalf of the University of California in 1900-1901 by George Reisner under the sponsorship of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, but was never published. Drawing on archival research and examination of hundreds of artifacts from the site that are held in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Jensen has reconstructed the excavations of the Hearst Expedition at the site, particularly the cemeteries. Her research examines the community’s funerary practices and considers the cultural memory the residents held of their town’s illustrious past.



About the Speaker:

Victoria Jensen is a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a past President of the Northern California Chapter of ARCE. Victoria earned her B.A. in Political Science and M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago and had a career in grant administration before returning to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in Egyptology at the University of California Berkeley, which she received in 2019.  Her dissertation research has just been published as a two-volume monograph in the Harvard Egyptological Studies series, entitled “The Phoebe A. Hearst Expedition to Deir el-Ballas: The non-elite cemeteries of the 17th–19th Dynasties.”

About ARCE-NC:

For more information, please visit https://facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaArce, https://arce-nc.org/, or http://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select “Berkeley, CA” as your chapter when you sign up.