About the lecture
The Old Kingdom was the first period of expansion of the Egyptian state. Alongside initially centralised royal administration, the development of crafts and pyramid construction, it was characterised by the growing influence of the solar cult. Egyptian rulers even came to regard themselves as sons of the sun god Ra. This development culminated in the Fifth Dynasty, sometimes called the age of the ‘sun kings’. It brought changes to kingship, administrative reforms, transformations in religious ideas and new architectural forms. The pyramid necropolis at Abusir flourished, with distinctive buildings closely associated with the solar cult—sun temples—arising nearby.
Doc. Mgr. Jaromír Krejčí, PhD. (1971),has worked at the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, since 1993. His research concerns Egyptian archaeology and history in the third and second millennia BCE and the development of Egyptian architecture. He has participated in excavations in Egypt since 1991 and coordinated research at the royal pyramid necropolis at Abusir since 1994. Since 2017, he has been a co-investigator on the Czech Science Foundation project on the origins and development of the solar cult and architecture in third-millennium BCE Egypt.
