Annual Lecture 2020 – Ancient lighthouses, shipwrecks and anchorages – exploring the maritime archaeology of Egypt
The 2020 Honor Frost Foundation Lecture will be given by Professor Emad Khalil on Monday 7th December at 6.00pm (GMT / London).
Since its establishment in 2011, the Honor Frost Foundation has contributed, in an unprecedented way, to the development of Maritime Archaeology in Egypt. However, Honor Frost’s own involvement in the exploration of Egypt’s underwater culture heritage had started some decades earlier. In 1968, at the request of the Egyptian Government, Frost was invited by UNESCO to visit an underwater archaeological site in Alexandria, which had been discovered in 1961 by an Egyptian sports diver. She made several dives on the site, and produced a number of sketches for some of the underwater remains she encountered. However, her most important contribution was to state, for the first time, that these are the remains of the legendary ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria. And a short article she wrote in 1975 was the first scientific publication to associate that site with the Pharos Lighthouse. More than five decades later, the name of Honor Frost, through her Foundation, still represents invaluable support to Egypt’s Maritime Archaeology. The HFF is supporting numerous projects and initiatives in the Egyptian Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Nile. These projects are much more than fieldwork and research: they extend to education, capacity building and outreach, which have played, and will continue to play, a fundamental role in the development of maritime archaeology in Egypt. This lecture will briefly present each of these projects, and highlight their most significant results.
Emad Khalil is a Professor of Maritime Archaeology at the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Egypt, and the founding Director of the Alexandria Centre for Maritime Archaeology & Underwater Cultural Heritage. Previous HFF Annual Lectures can be found here.
