Nico Piazza
Dr Hourig Sourouzian is a highly-respected German-Armenian Egyptologist and art historian, and the head of the Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on Egyptian royal statuary.
Sourouzian was born in Baghdad, to parents of Armenian descent, and grew up in Beirut. She studied Egyptology and art history in the Louvre and obtained a PhD in art history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne with a thesis on Egyptian royal statuary. Sourouzian additionally studied classical Arabic at the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris, and is fluent in the language, as well as Armenian, French, German and English.
She began her work in Egypt after being sent to Karnak by the Louvre. She leads a large multinational team as the head of the Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project. One of the most ambitious projects of its kind in Egypt, it seeks to unearth, study and preserve the ruined remains of the once-enormous and spectacular mortuary temple of ancient Egypt’s most powerful pharaoh. The plan, in the next 20 years, is to eventually create an open-air museum at the site.
Sourouzian is unusual among Egyptologists because her principal field isn’t philology or archeology but art history. Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, describes Sourouzian as “probably the best Egyptian art
historian of our time.”
Sourouzian is the co-author of the Catalogue of the Cairo Egyptian Museum together with the Cairo Egyptian Museum’s former director Mohamed Saleh. She is married to Rainer Stadelmann – the former Director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo – whom she often lectures with around the world. They live in Cairo.
