British Museum Lecture – Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt

The lecture will present the journey of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and explore the inscriptions and objects that helped scholars unlock one of the world’s oldest civilisations. The Rosetta Stone will be discussed alongside some of its ancient copies and the very inscriptions scholars studied in their quest to understand ancient Egypt. The lecture also features many of the stunning objects that highlight the impact of that breakthrough.

As the Curator of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum, Ilona Regulski is responsible for the papyrus collection and other inscribed material in the collection, including the Rosetta Stone. Ilona studied Egyptology at the Universities of Leuven in Belgium and Münster in Germany. She was a research fellow at the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels (2002-2004) and assistant-director of the Dutch-Flemish Institute in Cairo (2005-2010). She received a PhD in Egyptology from Leuven University in 2007 examining the Origins of Writing in Egypt. Ilona continued her career as guest-lecturer at Yale University (2011) and Humboldt post-doctoral fellow at the Free University in Berlin (2012-2014) before moving to the British Museum in 2015. She was the lead-curator of Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt at the British Museum (13 Oct 2022 – 19 Feb 2023).

Free, booking required.