Foy Scalf studies the intersection of people, materials, texts, and beliefs in ancient Egypt. In his UChicago dissertation, Passports to Eternity, and in a subsequent article, “From the Beginning to the End: How to Generate and Transmit Funerary Texts in Ancient Egypt,” he argued that the appearance of new religious manuscripts in first century AD Egypt develop out of an oral tradition that can be reconstructed based on pious graffiti recorded within sacred landscapes. In 2017 he edited the catalog Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt, through which an international team of scholars presented cutting-edge results of research on ancient Egyptian religious literature. The administrative side of these mortuary practices was examined in his 2021 volume The Archive of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis: Early Ptolemaic Ostraca from Deirl el Bahari (O. Edgerton), co-authored with Brian P. Muhs and Jacqueline E. Jay, which used an archive of Demotic texts through which to view the organization of the ancient Egyptian funerary industry. He is currently working on two catalogs publishing the Book of the Dead manuscripts of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Williams College.

To learn more about Foy Scalf’s research and publications, please visit his personal web page.