We, the editors of this volume, met Ann Macy Roth at various points in our academic careers at New York University, where she is Clinical Professor. For each of us, as well as her other mentees, some of whom are also included in this volume, she has served as an incredible mentor, professionally and personally. Ann’s engaging and innovative approaches to scholarship and the candid ways that she interacts with her students and colleagues further underscore her important contributions to the field of Egyptology. She is a highly respected scholar who is constantly moving the field forward.

Ann grew up in Portland, Oregon with her parents and sister. Her father kept a small plane, which she and her sister learned to fly, in their “backyard,” on the local airstrip. He would often tell his children that they needed to go to college and become doctors or else they would “end up digging ditches.” She eventually enrolled in the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, ultimately earning her Ph.D. in Egyptology from there in 1985. Her first journal article, an important study on Ahhotep I and Ahhotep II, was published in 1977, some eight years before she received this degree. Ann often jokes with her students that while she did listen to her father by going to college and becoming a doctor, she nonetheless still “ended up digging ditches.”

At Chicago, as an undergraduate taking graduate level courses, Ann bonded with fellow classmates Peter Dorman, Ray Johnson, and Emily Teeter. She primarily studied with Klaus Baer, but she took classes with Edward Wente and Jan Johnson as well. She was also able to confer with Charles Nims, the former Field Director of Chicago House, about his work on the tomb of Mereruka in the 1930s; this helped inform her own later work on the tomb of Watetkhethor. Her innovative research methods earned her a Smithsonian Fellowship from the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) (1981–1982) and the American Association of University Women’s Helen M. Weter Dissertation Fellowship (1983–1984). Her dissertation, “Ancient Egyptian Phyles in the Old Kingdom,” remains a seminal work in the study of social and labor organization during the Old Kingdom. Her research examined groups of seasonal workers that served in mortuary cults and construction crews, clarifying their attributes and functions. Through the integration of textual and archaeological evidence, Ann proposed that the phyle system originated in Upper Egypt during the Predynastic Period and played a significant role in the stability of the early Egyptian state.

During her time at Chicago, Ann attended the University of Arizona’s field school at Grasshopper and worked at Quesir el-Qadim with archaeologist Don Whitcomb and his wife and colleague, Jan Johnson. Studying field methods was quite rare for an Egyptology student at that time, and it speaks to Ann’s dedication and wide-ranging interests. At the end of her season at Quesir, in the spring of 1978, Ann spent three weeks as an apprentice for the Oriental Institute’s Epigraphic Survey, under the direction of Lanny Bell. This made her the first female epigrapher since Caroline Ransom Williams, in 1926. In 1994, Ann established the Giza Cemetery Project, where she has worked off and on ever since. She has also participated in the Giza Mastabas Project, the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, the Watetkhethor Copying Project, and the Medieval Luxor Project. Her projects were funded through multiple grants and fellowships, including three awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a United States Information Agency (USIA) Postdoctoral Fellowship from ARCE, an ARCE Antiquities Endowment Fund Grant, and a Faculty Research Grant from Howard University.

In addition to her epigraphical and archaeological contributions to the field, Ann has held a number of museum and teaching positions throughout her career. Prior to her current role as Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, Ann taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1988–1990) and Howard University (1993–2004). Her courses have covered the gamut of Egyptian history, religion, art, and language, as well as archaeological and epigraphic techniques and methodologies, at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

During her tenure at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1987–1991), Ann worked on the exhibition Mummies & Magic, writing numerous entries for its catalog and collaborating with Catharine Roehrig on a reconstruction of the Bersha Procession. Their efforts culminated in a joint article published in the MFA Bulletin. In 2009, Ann held the J. Clawson Mills Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where her research focused on the three ancient Egyptian chapels on display.

In 2019, Ann was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. During her appointment, she continued work on a book project on gender roles in ancient Egypt. In this, she argues that the Egyptian agricultural system, based on an annual flood, led to certain ideas and assumptions about fertility and gender relations that were distinct from those in other parts of the ancient world. This publication builds on her interest in gender roles, fertility, and the status of women in ancient Egyptian society, themes that have been present in Ann’s research throughout her career.

From 2002–2005, Ann served as editor for the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. She is a long-time member of ARCE and the International Association of Egyptologists, and she is listed in the Register of Professional Archaeologists. Ann has given countless lectures, talks, and conference papers over the years and has appeared as an expert on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, NatGeo, and ABC. Her work continues to be an inspiration to all of her students, mentees, colleagues, and collaborators.

While her primary interests have remained focused on the Old Kingdom, Ann’s research has contributed new understandings of ancient Egyptian material culture across time periods and on nearly all facets of Egyptian history and society. From her investigations of gender and sexuality to her critical reviews of Egyptology’s legacies, the impact of Ann’s scholarship is broad and enduring. But one theme that consistently runs through it is that of reassessment and reconsideration.

Ann regularly returns to well-known material and sheds new light on it by employing different approaches and methodologies, thus leading to new interpretations and readings of ancient Egyptian beliefs and practices. In this way, her research illustrates the importance of and need for continual questioning and reexamination within Egyptology. This volume—presented on the occasion of Ann’s 70th birthday—brings together papers from around the world that follow her tradition of rethinking aspects of ancient Egyptian material and visual culture. It is intended to honor her significant career as a scholar, mentor, and teacher and to celebrate and continue her dedication to analyzing ancient Egypt from novel perspectives.

We have organized the contributions into three sections that reflect Ann’s consistent ability to rethink, reassess, and innovate. The first section, New Interpretations, presents analyses that offer new ways of thinking about previous materials and ideas, pushing beyond traditional explanations. The second section, Rethinking Methodologies, includes papers whose authors have used innovative or novel techniques to reexamine objects and call into question earlier methodologies. The final section presents newly and recently published data that adds to the corpus of known object types and opens the door for new research. We hope that Ann will find these articles every bit as thought-provoking as Egyptologists over the years have found Ann’s own scholarship.