Ancient Egypt comes to Totnes

The Totnes Heritage Trust is pleased to welcome Alexander Ringsmith as its latest trustee.  Alexander is reading Archaeology at Durham University and he’s looking forward to engaging and informing people in his home town of Totnes and the wider Devon community on the area’s rich archaeological heritage.  Alexander and his family live in South Devon and prior to studying at Durham he was a student at KEVICC.

This month, however, he transported a good number of local residents far away from Devon to ancient Egypt with his Hieroglyphs workshops, the first on Friday 16 August which was then repeated the next day, and here we report on their success.

Despite a boiling day on Friday 16 August, the first session had a superb turnout, with Saturday’s session also drawing a good number of people. While many of the principles that were being covered in the workshop were quite complex, the group members took it in their stride and it was impressive how keen everyone was – with some participants requesting further reading.

After finding out about the history of the language and having a demonstration from Alexander, the group members had fun attempting to write their first names. It’s all so very different from the modern and older languages that we are familiar with, but everyone persevered and felt that the session was stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable and Alexander went on to repeat the workshop the following day for a second group.

“It was an absolute pleasure to organise the Basic Introduction to Hieroglyphs workshop,” said Alexander, “and hopefully it is just the beginning of what I can  contribute to the trust’s objectives of encouraging participation in heritage and archaeology in the local area.

“Community interest in archaeology is key to the protection and sustainability of the subject and always has been, and as such it is the duty of organisations like Totnes Heritage Trust to provide opportunities that promote this interest.”