“Prominent Expert for Archaeology in Sudan”

Egyptologist Angelika Lohwasser Awarded with WWU Research Award

Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Angelika Lohwasser from the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” received the research award of Münster University (WWU), which is endowed with 30,000 euros. She was honoured for her internationally recognised research during the university's New Year reception. The scholar, born in Vienna, is a prominent expert for archaeology in Sudan, as described in the mark-up of the award. Her sociological approach, which has not yet been applied in Egyptology until now, is ground-breaking.

Since 2009, Angelika Lohwasser teaches and researches at the Institute for Egyptology and Coptic Studies of the WWU. Since then, she has also been supervising a large research project in Wadi Abu Dom, a dried-up river bed in the Sudanese Bayuda desert. The WWU research award will serve as initial funding for the next large project in the desert. At the Cluster of Excellence, she heads the Project B2-12 “The Semantics of Change: Self-Affirmation, Propaganda, and Magic in the Visual Language of Egypt in the Early First Millennium B.C.”. In 2009, she received the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for young academics.

The WWU research award emphasises the significance of classical studies at the university, says the Egyptologist. “The award is important for their positioning – particularly that of archaeology – within the range of subjects of the WWU.” The archaeology of Sudan is thought to have “great potential” because there were a lot of “blank areas” on the archaeological map of Sudan.

Research in the Sudanese Desert

Most recently, the Egyptologist and archaeologist Dr. Helge Nieswandt, who also researches at the Cluster of Excellence and is the curator of the Archaeological Museum of the WWU, have had the responsibility of running a special exhibition on “Death and Eternity: The Münster Mummy Under Academic Scrutiny” (“Tod und Ewigkeit. Die Münster-Mumie im Fokus der Forschung”). The ancient Egyptian mummy, which stands at the centre of the exhibition, had been stored in the museum's collection for almost 40 years and was restored in 2015 with the support of the Cluster of Excellence. The scientific study of the mummy was the starting point for looking at how people treated the deceased in various cultures and periods. It shows the results of the exchange between Egyptologists, mummy researchers and philosophers. (upm/maz/vvm)