christs college crest

Prof. Fredrik Hagen

Biography

Fredrik Hagen was born in Stavanger, Norway, in 1977. He read Egyptology at the University of Liverpool (BA 2001), where he developed a particular interest in language and social history under Mark Collier and Chris Eyre. He then moved to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he graduated with an MPhil in 2002, and, after having moved to Christ’s for his PhD, he was elected as a Budge Fellow in 2005. His thesis sought to reconstruct the social history of an ancient Egyptian wisdom poem by combining material philology (i.e. looking at the materiality of the surviving manuscripts), archaeological context, close readings of the text itself, its transmission history, and intertextual references. This was subsequently published as An Ancient Egyptian Literary Text in Context: The Instruction of Ptahhotep (Peeters, 2012). While he was a fellow at Christ’s he also began to work on a collection of unpublished hieratic texts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, later published as New Kingdom Ostraca from the Fitzwilliam Museum (Brill, 2011) 

During his time at Christ’s he intermitted the fellowship for half a year to take up a temporary Lectureship at the University of Uppsala (2007), and a year after his return to Cambridge, in 2009, he joined the University of Copenhagen, first as Associate Professor and then, in 2017, as Full Professor. In Copenhagen he was elected as a member of the first cohort of the Danish Young Academy (2011-2015).

His research interests are grounded in textual material from the second millennium BC, both in terms of primary editions of new ostraca and papyrus fragments, but also in terms of the social context of writing more broadly, including archives and libraries. In addition to ongoing work on an archive from the Ramesside palace at Medinet el-Gurob (held in the British Museum and the Petrie Museum), he is also responsible for the hieratic material from the recent excavations of the mortuary temple of Thutmose III on the West Bank at Luxor (dir. by Myriam Seco Álvarez). The first volume of material from here, Ostraca from the Temple of a Million Years of Thutmose III, was published by Brill in 2021; a second volume, on the papyrus fragments of the temple archive, is in preparation. He has also worked on the socio-economic aspects of Egyptian tomb construction, and an edited volume (with Daniel Soliman and Rune Olsen) on this topic is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press. A third strand of interest is the history of the trade in Egyptian antiquities, where he wrote a book (with Kim Ryholt) on the period 1880-1930, including the activities of Sir Wallis Budge, whose generous bequest established the Budge Fellowships in Cambridge and Oxford. This is freely available as a pdf from the website of the Royal Danish Society of Sciences and Letters (http://publ.royalacademy.dk/books/684/4906?lang=en), and gives an overview of the mechanics of the trade, the main dealers, the legal framework at the time, as well as the social history of the trade.

  • Academic publications