Women's Monuments in Ancient Egypt

Speaker: Barbara Lesko

Egyptologist Barbara S. Lesko has devoted much of her long career to researching and writing about the women of ancient Egypt. Her Remarkable Women of Ancient Egypt was the first book in the English language on the subject and has gone into three editions since appearing in 1978. Since then she has published Women’s Earliest Records, the proceedings of a 1987 international conference she organized with NEH support at Brown University (where she was in the Department of Egyptology from 1982-2005). This was followed by invited articles in several encyclopedias and anthologies on women in ancient Egyptian religion, women’s rhetoric, women’s roles and civic rights, and women‘s monuments (Biblical Archaeologist, 1991) the topic she explored in numerous public lectures on the East Coast and will present in an updated version for the Central Arizona AIA on January 28th. In 1999 she published The Great Goddesses of Egypt with the University of Oklahoma Press, but her last book, published this year, is Lighthouse Life about the 18 years spent as mistress of a lighthouse on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

Barbara has been married for 43 years to Egyptologist Leonard H. Lesko, who retired in 2005 from the Wilbour Chair Professorship at Brown University where he chaired the Department of Egyptology since 1982. During those years, Barbara served as his Administrative Research Assistant and collaborator on the Dictionary of Late Egyptian, which was begun at the University of California, Berkeley, with NEH support and has now seen two editions. The Leskos have organized both archaeological and epigraphic expeditions in Egypt and led numerous tour groups there as well. Both are products of the University of Chicago’s famed Oriental Institute where Barbara received both her A.B. and A.M. in Egyptology during the 1960’s.

Since retirement in 2005, the Leskos have been spending winters in Gold Canyon, Arizona where the landscape reminds them of Upper Egypt.