Lauren Dogaer - Sacred Duties and Social Links: Theban Priestly Life in the Ptolemic Period

This lecture will be hosted on Wednesday, 3 September 2025 at 6:00 pm.

The religious landscape of Thebes—modern-day Luxor—was composed of numerous temples, chapels, sanctuaries, a vast necropolis, and processional roads connecting these sacred spaces. Individuals working in this landscape held diverse roles: temple priests performed rituals or acted as scribes; mortuary priests mummified the dead and maintained funerary cults; temple personnel baked offerings or guarded sanctuary doors.

Temple priests are primarily known from Egyptological sources such as funerary papyri and tomb equipment, while mortuary priests and temple personnel are mostly attested in Greek and Demotic documentary papyri. As these sources are often studied separately, their interconnections remain underexplored.

This lecture brings Egyptological and papyrological evidence into conversation to better understand the functions and titles of those active in Thebes’ religious sphere. It examines how priestly titles were used, translated, or adapted across languages, revealing how the priests’ functions were perceived.

Beyond this, it explores professional and personal ties among temple and necropolis workers: who collaborated during festivals, lived together as neighbors, or witnessed each other’s contracts. It also considers how terminology for services and payments may have differed between those employed in the temples versus the necropolis. By integrating different source types, the lecture offers a fuller picture of sacred duties, social links, and priestly life in Ptolemaic Thebes.

About the speaker

Lauren Dogaer studied Ancient History (2018) and Archaeology: Egyptology (2019) at KU Leuven University and recently finished her PhD in Egyptology at the University of Basel. Her main research interests focus on the religious-funerary practices of Greco-Roman Egypt, especially in the Theban area. For her dissertation, she has been researching the Theban priesthoods, focusing on their titles across the various scripts and languages of the Ptolemaic period, the equivalence of these titles between languages, and the professional and personal relationships among the different groups of priests active in the temple and necropolis. Her research combines papyrological, linguistic and archaeological data and methods in order to contribute to a better understanding of the multicultural and multilingual society of Ptolemaic Thebes.

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. The number of seats is limited and we work on a first-come, first-served basis. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier in case the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.