Pourdavoud Lecture Series: Verena Lepper

Elephantine Goes Global: Island of the Millennia

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

4:00pm

Royce Hall 306

Alternate Live Stream on Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94774888079

RSVP Link: https://forms.gle/uhWcmWsk8DDH1Rdv9

Over a period of ten years a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) was conducted at the National Museums in Berlin entitled “Localizing 4000 years of Cultural History. Texts and Scripts from Elephantine Island in Egypt.” Elephantine is an island on the Nile River in southern Egypt. Some of the research results are the digitalization, transcription, and translation of more than 10,000 texts written on papyrus or clay shards in ten different languages and scripts, including hieroglyphics, Hieratic, Aramaic, Coptic, and Arabic. Following this research, an exhibition was carried out on Berlin’s Museum Island, entitled: “Elephantine. Island of the Millennia.” The online version of this exhibition has been made available very recently and will be discussed here. The entire exhibition is trilingual, carried out in Arabic, English, and German, and was put together in close collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities. Museums and research can function as soft power. The exhibition and this talk showcase the relevance of 4,000 years of cultural history across several different ancient ethnic groups, including contemporary art. Thus “Elephantine Goes Global” now.

Verena Lepper is the Head of the Department of Antiquities at the Getty Villa and joined the J. Paul Getty Museum in October 2025. A distinguished Egyptologist and curator, she served for eighteen years as Curator of Egyptian and Oriental Papyri at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, Berlin (National Museums Berlin). Lepper has led major international exhibitions and research projects in Germany and abroad, including in Doha, Abu Dhabi, and at Harvard University. She also directed the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic Religion at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research focuses on Egyptian and Oriental papyri, language and religion, as well as literary and cultural history, and the history of science and the arts. To strengthen cultural diplomacy between Germany and the Arab world, she founded in 2013 the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA), which she continues to lead. She serves on several committees and supervisory boards focused on cultural and science policy. She was educated at Bonn, Oxford and Harvard University and is the author of twenty books and numerous articles for which she received several awards.