Smithsonian Journeys Experts

Betsy Bryan is the Professor Emerita of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University where she continues to teach and work with the Archaeological Museum. Betsy received her doctorate from Yale University’s Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Department and there established her lifelong interest in Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty and New Kingdom, ca. 1600 to 1069 B.C.E., as she wrote her dissertation on Tutankhamun’s great grandfather Thutmose IV. Interested in both Egyptian texts and arts from the beginning, she was fortunate to join both the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and at the same time the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ancient Arts Department as Co-Curator with Arielle Kozloff of the exhibition Egypt’s Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep III and his World. That exhibition opened in 1992 and traveled to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth and the Grand Palais of the Louvre in Paris. In 2002 she organized an exhibition with the National Gallery of Art, The Quest for Immortality, borrowed entirely from Egypt, and it traveled in North America for seven years. 

In 1993 Betsy began an epigraphic project in the unfinished painted tomb of the Royal Butler to Amenhotep II, Suemniwet in Thebes where she studied the painting techniques at work. In 2001 she began to excavate at the Temple of the Goddess Mut on the East side of Thebes, and she remains working at that site today where she studies the temple’s architecture, cult rituals, the hundreds of Sekhmet statues, and the archaeological evidence unearthed representing the support buildings to the temple in the reigns from Queen Hatshepsut to Akhenaten located behind the Sacred Lake of the temple.

Betsy has published and contributed to numerous books in addition to those on Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, and her familiarity with Thebes is deep and long. She has appeared in a number of documentaries and recently in the subscription series Real Ancient Egypt by Wondrium (former Great Courses). Betsy has a passion for Egypt and has shared that love with the public throughout her career.