 start today with our land acknowledgement first, which is that the Archeological Research Facility is located in Wichin, the ancestral and unceded Chicheno-speaking Alone people territory, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Alone people and that the art community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Alone ancestors and a race living Alone people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in support of Alone sovereignty and to hold University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian and Indigenous peoples. And there's various ways we can do that. But today, we are really happy to have Dr. Rita Lugarelli, who is going to be speaking to us on her recent work. She is in fact in the Department of Middle Eastern and Languages and Culture, where she is an associate professor of Egyptology and the class of 1939 chair in undergraduate education. So well done. She's also a curator, a faculty curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology and a fellow of the Digital Humanities here on campus. She's presently working on a 3D model of ancient Egyptian coffin. So we're looking forward to seeing that, working on a book of the dead in 3D, as well as a new monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled Agents of Punishment and Protection, Ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millennium BCE. So she obviously teaches a range of courses on Egyptology, but this course she's talking about today that's at San Quentin State Prison, which is just across the Richmond bridge, is through the Mount Tamil Pius College, which you'll probably tell us something about how that works out. So today, she's going to tell us about an Egyptian concept, mat, I'm probably not saying that correctly, and how teaching about that in prison is probably very engaging and informative. So please welcome Professor Luccarelli. Thank you, Christine, for the nice introduction. Good afternoon, everyone. Do you have a small light? I'm happy to be here. Let's see if I can I can do a light with my left. Okay, got the light. Don't worry. This should be enough. Yes, so I'm happy to be here to present my teaching activity at San Quentin State Prison, and San Quentin is the oldest prison in California, as probably most of you know, built in 1852 in the San Francisco Bay to replace a shift that served as California's first official prison. And San Quentin has been notoriously infamous, an infamous place where the use of torture as interrogation technique was banned only in 1944 and home to the large death row population in the United States. In 1969, oops, it's not really changing on the screen. Oh, okay. In 1969, it was also here that country music legend that Johnny Cash sang the crowds of incarcerated men, San Quentin, you've been living hell to me. In 2022, Governor Newsom announced the dismantling of death row at San Quentin, while the space it occupied will become a positive and healing environment, according to the Newsom administration, which wants to rename the facility San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. In fact, San Quentin prison is already offering a number of educational and rehabilitation programs for its incarcerated population. And in 2021, I was given the opportunity to join one of them by becoming part of the faculty of Mount Tamalpais College, the first accredited junior college in the country based behind bars. Mount Tamalpais College associates of arts degree in liberal arts. It's a multidisciplinary education that offer introductory courses in the humanities, social science, math and science. To earn the AA degree, students must complete 61 semester units, so 20 classes across a range of subjects. And most courses are introductory and lower division and are transferable to four year institution. The college serves about 300 students at a time, which is a small portion of the over 3,000 incarcerated people housed at San Quentin. But the enrollment is capped around 300 because of limited classroom space. At least 3,731 students have taken courses through the program over the years. The humanities program includes a number of courses on world history, history of California, history of American government and the like. The focus on the history courses has been mainly for modern histories with a glimpse into the ancient world through two of the electives, history 226, ancient African history and history 227, ancient world history, none of which involve the study of ancient Egypt or of the ancient Middle East. Thanks to MTC, wonderful staff and board in fall 2021, my course on the history and art of ancient Egypt, history 280, was introduced in the humanities curriculum. And as far as I know, this has been the first time in the US that Egyptology entered the prison and was presented to incarcerated students. I designed a course similarly to an introduction course to Egyptology for undergraduate students. I used Salima Ikram's introduction to ancient Egypt, one of the most popular textbooks used in Egyptological courses for undergraduates. And that was the main textbook, but I also provided the various articles in a reader. You can see on the slide some titles of studies included in the syllabus, which introduced basic issues about ancient Egyptian history, archaeology, history of reception, art, literature, and also Nubian studies, the history, archaeology of ancient Sudan, which has been one of the favorite topics for a classroom that was mainly composed by African American students. We also read some extracts from Karakuni's book on Ashepsut to discuss widely the role of women in ancient Egypt. And did I wish to thank Kara for donating 20 copies of it for our prison library. My colleague Ben Porter from Middle Eastern languages and cultures has been also donating books on Middle Eastern archaeology. And we are open for donations, of course. As for most of the courses of the MTC programs, history 280 could be supported by a TA, and I was lucky to have my own back then PhD student, Kia Johnson. She is now a lecturer for digital humanities here in Berkeley, who has been tutoring the students, guiding them through the weekly assignments, which consisted in writing one or two paragraphs commenting on the reading of the week and answering prompts. And here you see an example of those from week 10 of the course. So pretty advanced already through the study of ancient Egypt. So for the class introducing the ancient Egyptian written culture, the prompt was imagine to be an ancient Egyptian scribe. How would you use your skills? What kind of text would you like to write and why? Or when talking about ancient Egyptian daily life? How do you think the geography and environment of a land influences its culture, society and religion? I designed the prompts in a way that could simulate the students' imagination about how those ancient people lived and felt the world around them and how they produced knowledge. These prompts and in general the long class discussions were meant also to let them compare their own lived experience with the life experience of people living in a different time and society. And what we, I and Kia, were not expecting is how deep the ancient Egyptian art, material culture and text would resonate among incarcerated students and how easily they could relate to the study material we were exposing them to. Here it is important also to note that due to COVID restrictions that have been in place until very recently in prison, the enrollment for each class was capped at 15. My class reached maximum enrollment with 11 out of 15 students being African Americans. And it is well known how blacks constitute the highest percentage of inmates in the US and in California, especially in male prisons. Black men comprise about 30% of the US population but 35% of those incarcerated. In California, despite its reputation as a progressive state, it's one of the epicenters of mass incarceration in the United States, incarcerating more people than any other state except Texas. African Americans remain overrepresented in California's prison population and in recent data, 28.5% of the state male prisoners were African American compared to just 5.6% of the state's adult male residents. And the imprisonment rate for African American men is 4,236 per 100,000 people. Again, not super update data but more or less we are there. 10 times for imprisonment rate for white men, which is 422 per 100,000. The implication of teaching a class of mainly black students could be guessed considering that the real and or imagined world of the pharaohs been revised in black America through a series of important philosophical, political, literary and artistic movements that have shaped black American life. What I have found among the black incarcerated students of my course was a multi-faceted history of the reception of ancient Egypt. It's social history, arts and religion that had roots within the African American communities from the civil rights movement to the Black Lives Matter protest and that showed how ideals of black power and of racial justice have been closely connected to the claim of ancient Egypt being part of black heritage. Most of the students were also believers, mainly Christians or Muslims. They definitely knew their Bible and were looking in discourse for discussion about the Exodus. As outlined in various studies, the book of Exodus is a powerful narrative of liberation that has been a centrally imaginative touchstone in the black American struggle against US racism and at the center of the writings of black thinkers as a fitting allegory for the painful experience of exile and the African diaspora. In these narratives, pharaohs can alternatively be seen as a tyrant who enslaved the Israelites or as the glorious royal ancestor of their original lost civilization. Martin Luther King said in one of his speeches, whenever pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had the favorite, favorite formula for doing it. He kept the slaves fighting among themselves but whenever the slaves get together, something happens in pharaoh's court and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out out of slavery and I'm quoting this passage since this was the kind of perception and receptions of ancient Egypt in the classroom even among the non-black minority of the students. I think my TA's Kias Johnson's feedback on this course which she kindly offered to share for this paper is a powerful and explicative example of the kind of conversation we were having in class and therefore were too reading full. And so I'm quoting Kia here teaching about ancient Egypt that sent Quentin was both eye-opening and rewarding. When I volunteered to be Rita Luccarelli's teaching assistant, I was close to graduating with my doctorate. I volunteered because I felt that I live in a little bit of an enclave at Berkeley and I felt that I wasn't really contributing to making my community a better place and this was a good opportunity to do it. It was also outside of my comfort zone. My job involved substituting for Rita and also leading a weekly study hall where students would come in to talk, work on the homework or to ask questions. I had never worked in a prison before. I didn't know what to expect. Teaching students at Quentin was much different than teaching undergraduates. While I usually have to tease questions out of my undergraduates, the students at Quentin were very interested in learning, did the assigned reading and almost always had questions and comments. Many of the questions related the material to their own experience. These connections were sometimes surprising to me but also really caused me to think. For example, in a discussion on the economy of ancient Egypt, I mentioned that most farmers didn't own the land they worked which instead belonged to the state or the temple. Farmers paid a large percentage of their crops upward through a series of middlemen with most of the produce ending up with the temple or state and being redistributed to priests and administrators. One of my students exclaimed, that's sharecropping. We know all about sharecropping. Several others in the class chuckled. This is a connection I never made but it was one that was obvious to my mostly black students. When reflecting on this remark and also on what the students told me about working for petty change in the prison industries workshop, it was one of several moments I had in that class where the recent and ancient past both seemed uncomfortably close to the present. This sense of closeness to the past can be disturbing but also comforting. Several of my students were artists who worked Egyptian teams into their art. These students find a sense of identity in the idea that ancient Egypt was a great African culture when the generation of black Americans had been told that there were no great African cultures. Other students were looking for a connection between ancient Egypt and their religious beliefs. I had to tread somewhat carefully in discussion of the historicity of the story of Exodus. To my knowledge, there is no evidence of a historical Moses or of a dramatic escape across the Red Sea. There are narratives of small numbers of enslaved people who escaped the Egyptians. I tried to be honest about the scope of our knowledge in a way that was respectful to a faith that plays an important part in the lives of the students who were asking the questions. Some students get more immediate benefit from the class. I had one student who would come to study to the study hall and sleep. He told me his new cellmate was mentally unstable and that he didn't go to sleep at night until he heard the other guy snoring because he was afraid he might get stabbed. Even if knowing about ancient Egypt didn't add anything permanent to the lives of my students, the ability to come to class, to be mentally stimulated, to talk and to feel temporarily safe certainly did. To me, being able to make a small difference in the lives of my students was the bottom line that made the class worthy. I have to thank Kia. She cannot be here today for this thoughtful feedback. She's still volunteering for the program and helping the students in the new computer lab that they just got and they're very happy about it. I decided to call this paper, Teaching Math, referring to the main ancient Egyptian idea of what is right, personificated by a beautiful winged goddess. This is going to be also the title of a more extensive publication and preparing because in fact the study of ancient Egyptian religion and ethics and the way they influenced the reception of this ancient culture among my incarcerated students is what has made my experience about teaching Egyptology in prison really unique. The challenge within this cultural setting and while dealing with reception has been to be able to present a rigorous academic view of ancient Egypt, its culture and society to a student population whose personal experience in prison as well as the memory of their life outside the cultural space makes most of the teaching material very sensitive, especially when dealing with religious beliefs, ethics, wisdom, literature, the idea of math itself, what is right versus what is punishment in this and in the other world. Ancient Egyptian religion, the way it shaped the Egyptian worldview and daily life, the conception of the divine, the belief in life after death on earth has been the topics the students wanted to discuss the most. I do not think I ever spent so much time in any other course that you see Berkeley on the scene you see here on the slide, the final judgment of the ancient Egyptian book of the dead. As I did in my San Quentin class of Egyptology, the students wanted to know every detail on the scenes and carefully attempted an interpretation of the full text of Spell, so-called Spell 125 of the book of the dead and the so-called the negative confession which the deceased has to say that he did not sin, he did not commit any sin. One of the students proudly told me that he hang the color picture that you see here from the famous papyrus of Annie in the British Museum that which I distributed in class in his cell as a reminder that justice will be established eventually. Many of them are lifers waiting to be paroled and even invited me by the way to go visit his decorated cell walls, but of course I couldn't do that. At the beginning I was also concerned that they would overinterpret the sources, transform Egyptology in a religious teaching, after a few classes and all of discussions about the ancient Egyptian religion. I was however a bit sure that they were more interested to learn about my view of ancient Egypt and they're truly fun to challenging their own. They were listening, reading, making questions in order to learn and not for finding confirmation of their own ideas about what justice on earth and in the netherworld is in the ancient Egyptian worldview. I had to make sure they understood the difference between primary and secondary sources and that Baj, which is a famous author in Egyptologies from 1920 who published facsimiles of the book of the dead, I had to make sure Baj was, they understood Baj was a secondary source and not the author of the book of the dead and here you can see one of the assignments response about becoming an Egyptologist, what kind of sources, methodologies you would use as an Egyptologist and so the answer if I were to become an Egyptologist first I would want to learn about the text. I've always been very interested in studying hieroglyphics, should be hieroglyphs and Wallis Baj's book of the dead is a famous book. I'm very intrigued about Egyptian text and history and I pray that I can be introduced to a new world of thought by my new Egyptian instructor. I'm not Egyptian but it's nice to read that. The incarcerated population is also plenty of amazing artists and prison art is finally being recognized also in public spaces for instance at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco where a virtual exhibition of prison art including the work of some of my students was hosted already back in 2020. Egypt has been greatly represented and here I like to mention two of my students who enrolled in my course especially in order to find further inspiration for their art and so Geralt Morgan who is finally at leap at old after serving more than a half of his life sentence and as instructor I was able to help the process with the recommendation letter for a parol board and this is another really important function of teaching in prison you can actually help them through their access to parol board. His painting wants to honor his African heritage struggles and futures and you can see Egyptian symbols and imagery here as well. Lamavi's short come Komondoi Villa whose work has been defined by art critics as Afrofuturism through the fusion of pointillism and expressionism with the dash of African symbolism that you can see in his life-size piece The Feminine Yakub of 2042 which depicts all seeing eyes, pyramids, circles and cube shapes that are strategically placed around three African queens in full tribal address while in the other painting Amani Candice he depicted a fierce warrior-like queen of Nubia and in class he wanted to talk all the time about queenship in ancient Egypt Nubian women, Nubian queens defending the kingdom from Rome. Some of the of my Egyptology students who have successfully graduated two summers ago now and I wanted to show you these beautiful pictures from graduation despite COVID despite having to learn through prison quarantines and with no possibility to use internet and in fact this was another challenge of teaching in prison the impossibility to even use a powerpoint or internet links to academic websites the only tool is the whiteboard and so you can see them here proud of something they achieved through real work and dedication. So what is the lesson we can learn from it as scholars of the ancient world? How does the ancient past create meaning for the presence of incarcerated people of in the US and abroad? I'd like to let two alumni of the MTC program to speak for me Emil de Weaver is a black community organizer, literary writer and journalist who co-founded Prison Renaissance org while serving 67 years to life sentence in prison. His sentence was then commuted in 2017 thanks to his community service, productivity and his story of transformation after having graduated at the MTC program and so he said and this is from the website of the program so you can go back to the website if you want to hear more about alumni. If I can teach generations to write with the consciousness that their work can heal our world and they teach generation after them the legacy continues and at the arena also the staff photographer for the only inmate around newspaper in California, San Quentin News, which I invite you also to check online and we have a UC Berkeley professor Bill Drummond who's been also a mentor for me in teaching in prison who keeps teaching a course on San Quentin News so UC Berkeley students can actually go in prison and work with journalists inmate and so he said a liberal arts education is a window into the beauty struggle and cruelty of humanity's will to endure through it we can strive to be and do better we can learn what it means to uphold and respect the beliefs of others no matter how different or contrary they are to our own and that's indeed what I found out while teaching to those students and these words also bring us back to the ancient Egyptian wisdom literature and the praises of knowledge and education that one can read for instance in Destructions of Annie one of the favorite texts also my students one will do all you say if you are versed in writings study the writings put them in your heart then all your words will be effective whatever office ascribe is given it should consult the writings egyptology with it with its in is incredible various and fascinating primary sources cultural entanglements and changes through the millennia that one needs to understand while consuming centuries of scholarship covering so many sub-disciplines from archaeology to philology through anthropology and science is definitely a field that can be renewed if taught in a prison environment especially today when we are continuously discussing how to rebrand diversify and decolonize a discipline that together with greek and roman studies has been used for centuries to support colonialist projects it is not the case that and i'll show you this video later but um it's not a case that uh classics is now also being taught in prison and the pedagogies used in prison settings are being discussed in scholarly conferences and the recent publication you see here on the slide has collected them engaging with ancient egypt in prison and as instructor make sure they engage with it in a safe and stimulating learning environment where the incarcerated students are reminded and reassured that even behind bars they can contribute to humanity could be one of the new frontiers of our disciplines archaeology and egyptology in his book teaching to transgress bell hooks wrote the classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility in which we have the opportunity to labor for freedom to face reality even if we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries to transgress this is education as the practice of freedom and so to let incarcerated students move beyond the physical boundaries of the prison setting and be transported in a world ruled by math is probably the minimum contribution we could make as scholars as egyptologists and as humans lucky enough to live outside those bars so i hope with this lecture to maybe stimulate students or other faculty to join the program as volunteered or you can also make a good small donation um or get in touch with me for more information i don't know how we are with time i had the small videos uh yeah from um senquente news kindly shared by bill drummond and many of the students of the course are also part of the are actually journalists in the program so just you can have here a glimpse of the educational building and the senquente news where they work our entire staff of 15 inmates reporters six community volunteers the graduate students of uc-berkeley journalism and business school is honored to be nominated and receive this important award at the time senquente news received the jane's madison award our staff and free world volunteers did uh they worked and out there providing the public with a unique journalistic work uh it's really informed decisions connected also to the humanities program the senquente news staff takes our journalistic responsibility very very seriously we aspire to remove the curtain of secrecy that so often shrods in darkness not only at senquente anyway but also in through our nation's criminal justice system remember thank you so much and there are any questions i'm happy to answer them class and do you have um you have new students every time or do you have students that come back again and again if you've taught it more than once so that they kind of dive in deeper and really yeah so now i'm hoping to teach it again soon it's an elective so the program is not too big they don't have space for many electives and they try to alternate so they're offering now other courses but i kept teaching for instance last semester a course on comparative religion and this semester tutoring for writing and co-teaching for course on literature where of course i talk about ancient literature and so on and there are some returning students and i could note how they really wanted to continue to know more about the ancient world that was really really great to to see how they really they were really curious although it's let's say as a field it's something that will not help them to get a job when they get out unless oh no they really they're really lucky i guess yeah hi thank you for the talk um you mentioned the the work of it like the graduate student that was helping you as a teacher's assistant what role can undergraduates play in in this program like are there opportunities for us to get involved there's that something where we need to graduate first oh no no um the volunteer program is open for applications every semester and you don't have to be enrolled not even at university some of the instructors are school teachers or anyone interested could contribute of course you will have sort of interview and i will see what is your specialty and if you would be able to teach and there is then a series of workshops as a training to learn all the rules there are a lot of rules thank you could you say something about matz maat which is obviously an important concept in the egyptian world viewer in the past egyptian culture if you will and how you obviously used it because they seem to engage with it and how you've talked about other things but how they engage with that concept that egyptian yeah thank you for this question indeed in my larger publication on this project that is basically on reception of ancient egypt in modern and contemporary america uh black america actually more in particular um it's it's interesting because matz in ancient egypt is indeed what is right for the egyptians which is different than what we consider right also it's all connected to the eretics and so with the students we were discussing a lot how some kind of violence in ancient egypt is matz if it's the pharaoh defending the land as meshi the enemies then killing is what is right is matz so matz is one of these personifications of justice which is cosmic justice but it's also social justice and is really embedded in the ancient egyptian world view and so it was really interesting to discuss how it's important to understand what matz was in ancient egypt from an amic point of view from the ancient egyptian point of view but that does not mean that we should honor matz in the same way right and that so we talk a lot about comparative views on society and the violence and punishment of course being them for them was very interesting to understand how justice connect to punishment and if punishment is wrong when is wrong why and how ancient cultures teach us some lessons about who to punish when so it was really as i said very complex in a sense to discuss these topics with them because they were always really related relating the course material to their own experience of course i try also to to show how those in ancient egypt gods are personifications of important concepts many times so matz also chaos is represented by another god god male god matz is the female goddess so why also the questions why justice is female and chaos is male for instance right and so well there are also female deities who are very chaotic and angry and dangerous right yeah so then they wanted to know more about sakmet the lion goddess who send demons on earth to kill everyone when she's upset and things like that so but it's um i think the ancient egyptian religion is um it's attractive for them also because it's really easy to visualize we have so many visuals when i've been teaching them the course of comparative religion for instance they had they were really struggling sometimes to talk understand concepts of buddhism or hinduism without many visuals explaining more philosophical concepts so that was really challenging also to find honestly a textbook to use for comparative religion since all was to be in the textbook i could not use anything from the internet or i could not bring it to a point so that was challenging thank you did you say a little bit more about mount tamal pious college is it a local accredited institution or is it all inside the prison yeah yeah it's been recently accredited and it grew a lot it's the x it was called a prison prison project or something like that and then became mount tamal pious college and i think we all really to the vision of the president geordie you and the way it has been growing with more staff faculty volunteers all the faculty are volunteers although right now they're they're trying to help us at least for instance students volunteers who need transportations one of the problems is that you need to drive there there's no really public transportation available and so could be even sort of expensive to go there and teach across the bridge of the time but they're they're really accommodating also the volunteers need and and right now they are expanding with a series of other programs in collaboration with other educational programs in senquentin is not the only educational programs there are events i was hoping eventually to organize a conference they're inviting colleagues from uc berkeley who would like to come and give a lecture on what they do so it's it's a program which is growing and it's keeps growing and providing new opportunities to the incarcerated people and i've been pretty content of until now to teach for them in terms of donating books i was donating some books at mose a special place for the prison library project yeah so they they have um we have our own library accessible to the students and now also a computer lab and they have small ipads the students now they can use with the limited access to internet at the moment we are a full capacity it's not a big library at a certain point we had too many donations and there was no space for new books uh i wish we could have more books of archaeology because as i showed the the humanities program program is mostly on modern histories uh american history california history um i mean modern california history but there's not much of archaeology so now there's something about from ancient egypt uh but it would be great to have more archaeological publications of course eventually as soon as we make some room for it yeah thank you right i know there's there's so many books that could be available there were certain groups of books types of books they really wanted i think dictionaries sociology well there should be of course books um more introductory books as for undergraduates because um of course there are no specialized students there so general introductions for instance with a lot of nice images they really enjoyed those visuals you know to see visuals that's great also journal journal series so ben porter for instance gave me um i still have to talk about biblical archaeology some series of uh biblical archaeology which is another topic that in the interest them a lot because religion plays a big role there well thank you so much