Helen Strudwick
speaker
22 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 9 Mar
Helen Strudwick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When we actually start looking at objects and can actually see chisel marks or somebody's thumbprint or something like that, you immediately become more connected to the person who made it.
Well, we're seeing it on a papyrus that contained a text that we refer to as the Book of the Dead, which is a funerary papyrus.
And that is illustrated with small vignettes that accompany various spells that are written inside there.
And on one of those, we see a very large black jackal.
And either side of the body of the jackal is a very noticeable, when you spot it, white stripe that looks very much like the old style of Tippex that I used to use when I was using a typewriter to correct it.
And it looks as if it's been used to change the shape of the body of the animal.
You can see it really clearly when you sort of stop and look at it in any detail.
The thing is that most people only glance at the vignette because the text is the part that has been in the past a very interesting thing to Egyptologists.
But when you start looking at the way that the vignettes have been painted, then there's a moment where you go, oh, why is there that white stripe there and another one there?
Well, looking at the rest of the papyrus, the artist or artists...
is extremely skilled and doesn't use paint in a wasteful way at all.
So where there are layers of paint, they are used very carefully.
So we use infrared imagery on it and that allows us to see through the layers of paint, particularly see the black layers of paint that might be underneath things.
And, you know, right as rain, we could see that the body originally was much, much fatter and that there's these white stripes which overlie a significant part of the black.
So it's quite clear it's been done to thin it down.
I then also have been looking at editions of other books of the dead.
And lo and behold, yes, I can see it on other papyri.
To me, it's been a delight to actually have time to,
to draw people's attention to these amazing people who made these things and to kind of really humanize the Egyptians perhaps a bit more.
Because for a lot of people, the first focus of their attention has always been on the kings of Egypt or the maybe esoteric
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