Lauren Dogaer

Lauren Dogaer (1996) holds an MA in Ancient History (2018) as well as an MA in Archaeology: Egyptology (2019) from KU Leuven University (Belgium). Her research interests are related to the funerary-religious practices of the Graeco-Roman period and more specifically in the Theban area. As a student in Ancient History she gained experience in (Greek/Demotic) papyrology as well as became familiar with Theban priestly archives while doing an internship at the Trismegistos Archives Project. During her MA in Egyptology, she followed the ‘Egyptology in the field-programme’ at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) and joined the KU Leuven archaeological mission to Dayr al-Barsha.

Since April 2021 she works as a project assistant on the Beyond the Text project.

Lauren will mainly focus on the beneficiaries of the documents and the socio-cultural context in which these priests were functioning during their lifetime. Amongst others, she will investigate to which cults and temples these priests were attached and how they worked together in relation to the religious festivals celebrated in the Theban area. Interesting in this regard is her investigation into how the owners of Late Funerary Literature, mainly belonging to the high clergy of Amun-Ra, worked together with mortuary priests active in the Theban necropolis. She will also research the contact these priests had with the Greek and Roman governments, as well as the possibility of investments by these governments into religious festivals. In addition, she will analyse the sacred geography of cult places, processional roads used for festivals, burial places of priests and so on. Numerous cult places and religious locations were frequented by various priests with different functions. Researching the relationship between these different locations will therefore contribute to a better understanding of how these priests operated. As the Late Funerary Literature displays an array of titles and cults, often paralleled on objects or in documentary papyri, mixing and matching these attestations will contribute to a contextualised knowledge of the socio-cultural factors related to this type of literature. For her research Lauren combines Egyptological, papyrological and archaeological data and methods.