Biographical note

Pål Steiner has an MA in Egyptian archaeology from K.U. Leuven and an MA in religious studies from the University of Bergen, where he has been teaching Ancient Near Eastern religions. Ha has published a collection of Egyptian myths in Norwegian. He is now an academic librarian at the University of Bergen, while finishing his PhD on Egyptian funerary rituals | Alexandros Tsakos studied history and archaeology at the University of Ioannina, Greece. His Master thesis was written on ancient polytheisms and submitted to the Université Libre, Belgium. He defended his PhD thesis at Humboldt University, Berlin on the topic ‘The Greek Manuscripts on Parchment Discovered at Site SR022.A in the Fourth Cataract Region, North Sudan’. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen with the project ‘Religious Literacy in Christian Nubia’. He is a founding member of the Union for Nubian Studies and member of the editorial board of Dotawo. A Journal of Nubian Studies | Eivind Heldaas Seland is associate professor of ancient history and pre-modern global history at the University of Bergen. His research focuses on the relationship between ideology, trade, and political power in the Near East and Indian Ocean in the pre- Islamic period. He is the author of Ships of the Desert, Ships of the Sea: Palmyra in the world trade of the first three centuries CE (Harrassowitz 2016) and co-editor of Sinews of Empire: Networks in the Roman Near East and beyond (Oxbow 2017).