Uncovering Ancient Egypt with Bettany Hughes

Bettany Hughes brings her talk Uncovering Ancient Egypt to the Main Theatre at Storyhouse on Wednesday 4 November, starting at 7:30pm. It's a live talk rather than a lecture, and it runs for about an hour and fifty minutes with an interval in the middle.

Hughes is an award-winning historian who's spent twenty-five years turning ancient history into storytelling. She's fronted more than fifty documentaries, watched by 250 million people worldwide, and written bestsellers like The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and Venus & Aphrodite. Stephen Fry once called her "the most perfect tour guide I know", which gives you a good sense of how she works: she doesn't just list dates and names, she takes you through the period.

In this talk, she looks at how Ancient Egypt's innovations in medicine, mathematics, engineering and governance laid the foundations of the modern world, and how Egyptian ideas about the afterlife, justice and leadership still shape us today. It's less about the pharaohs as distant figures and more about the practical, lasting things they left behind. If you've ever wondered why we still think about justice or leadership the way we do, she'll be tracing those lines back to the Nile.

Tickets are £27.60 to £39.30 for members and £31.50 to £43.50 for non-members, though the show is currently sold out. It starts at 7:30pm in the Main Theatre at Storyhouse, and with the interval, you're looking at nearly two hours of it.