The present volume grew out of the Second Missouri Egyptological Symposium held at Missouri State University in October 2019. This meeting followed in the footsteps of the tremendous efforts of the organizers of the inaugural Missouri Egyptological Symposium, held the year prior at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO. Principal among those organizers was Sara Orel. The theme of the second symposium was "Unwrapping Ancient Egypt" -- that is, laying bare the study of ancient Egypt in its numerous contexts. The primary heuristic driving this "unwrapping" was the location and demonstration of the various connections between Egyptology and other fields and intellectual practices, broadly defined. As represented in this volume, the scholars at the symposium drew these interconnecting lines between Egypt and other cultures in antiquity, Egypt and the history of the United States, and ancient Egypt and the museum. The symposium involved an additional important point of connection: academic research and pre-college education. The organizers of the symposium reached out to K-12 educators in Missouri to invite them to participate in workshops that addressed the unique challenges of teaching about antiquity (particularly ancient Egypt) and allowed for the exchange of resources and curricula.

Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt uniquely considers how power was constructed, maintained, and challenged in ancient Egypt through mortuary culture and apotheosis, or how certain dead in ancient Egypt became gods. Rather than focus on the imagined afterlife and its preparation, Julia Troche provides a novel treatment of mortuary culture exploring how the dead were mobilized to negotiate social, religious, and political capital in ancient Egypt before the New Kingdom. Troche explores the perceived agency of esteemed dead in ancient Egyptian social, political, and religious life during the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700-1650 BCE) by utilizing a wide range of evidence, from epigraphic and literary sources to visual and material artifacts. As a result, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt is an important contribution to current scholarship in its collection and presentation of data, the framework it establishes for identifying distinguished and deified dead, and its novel argumentation, which adds to the larger academic conversation about power negotiation and the perceived agency of the dead in ancient Egypt.