Martin Bommas

Director of the Mission

Martin Bommas is Professor and Museum Director at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and Director of the Qubbet el-Hawa Research Project (QHRP) in Aswan, Egypt. Between 2006 and 2018 he was Reader in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham and Curator of the Eton Myers Collection of Ancient Egyptian Art. Between 2013 and 2018 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, and between 2016 and 2017 Scholar at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center, Los Angeles.

Martin studied at the Universities of Heidelberg/D and Leiden/NL. He has spent much of his research career in Elephantine, Aswan/Egypt, where he excavated settlement remains of the Old and Middle Kingdoms and reconstructed the Temple of Chnum (18th Dyn.) according to the epigraphical and architectural evidence. From 1994-2001 he was research assistant in Heidelberg working on mortuary liturgies. He was appointed assistant professor in Egyptology at the University of Basel in 2001, where he mainly studied the theory of ritual in Ancient Egypt and the diffusion of Egyptian gods in the Aegean. By recording archaeological data in Greece and Turkey he succeeded in reconstructing the main rituals and history of the so-called Mysteries of Isis by a combined research on textual and archaeological evidence. Martin Bommas taught Egyptology at the Universities of Heidelberg/D, Basel/CH, Zurich/CH and Birmingham/UK, and has held visiting appointments in Rome/I, Venice/I and Sheffield/UK.

Martin Bommas has published in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Swiss books, periodicals, and review journals in English, German and Italian.