Hi folks, a little announcement: I’m going to be broadcasting my lectures via YouTube from now on. The first few of them will be freely available to all, and instead of paying the usual registration fee in these cases I’ll be encouraging you all to to make a small voluntary contribution via the ‘super thanks’ button (more on this below).
*UPDATE 28 August 2024: Lapis memberships are now available (see here).
Unfortunately I’ve had to increase the price of membership in this category: I hadn’t realised that I couldn’t just make up the prices – YouTube forces you to chose one of their options, and after much hand-wringing I’ve decided to go for a slightly higher amount than previously advertised, so Lapis membership will cost £12.99 per month. I am very sorry about this, I know that even the previous price (£10.99) would have been unaffordable for some of you. I would love all my lectures simply to be free to everyone, but I have to pay the bills(!) so either I charge what seems like a reasonable amount or I have to stop doing the lectures altogether. Thanks for your understanding!
I have also decided not to add a ‘gold category’ for now, as I cannot be certain that my schedule will allow me to offer the additional benefits. Again, I am sorry about this. YouTube encourages creators to add higher categories like this for anyone wishing to provide an extra level of support to creators and of course if you’d like to send an extra contribution you can still do via YouTube’s ‘thanks’ button or via ‘supers’ etc, and there’s also good old fashioned(!) PayPal as well.
I have adjusted the table below accordingly.
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From September 2024 I’ll be giving one new lecture each month and these will be available to channel members in the ‘Lapis’ and ‘Gold’ categories only. There will be three categories of membership altogether as follows:
| Level | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Name | Alabaster | Lapis | Gold |
| Available from | May 2024 | September 2024 | Tbc |
| Price | £2.99 | £12.99 | £25.99 |
| Benefits | Badges | Badges | Badges |
| Emojis | Emojis | Emojis | |
| Shout outs | Shout outs | Shout outs | |
| Photos and updates | Photos and updates | Photos and updates | |
| Exclusive access to new live lectures | Exclusive access to new live lectures | ||
| Early access to recordings of the new lectures | Early access to recordings of the new lectures | ||
| Exclusive access to the full lectures archive | Exclusive access to the full lectures archive | ||
| Q&As / AMAs | Q&As / AMAs | ||
| Private online chats | |||
| Meet-ups |
Further details:
Level 1, Alabaster (£2.99 per month)
- Badges and emojis: these are for members only and allow you to stand out in the chat during the live broadcasts.
- This will allow me to identify members in the chat more easily and to give ‘shout outs‘ in reply to any posts
- There will be a ‘members only’ area on the channel which I’ll be using to post exclusive updates – photos and videos etc from ‘behind-the-scenes’
Level 2, Lapis (£10.99 per month)
- All the above perks.
- Exclusive access to the live broadcasts of new lectures
- Early access to recordings of the new lectures (members only for the first three months)
- Exclusive access to the full lectures archive: I’ve made quite a few recordings of my past talks available online but I still have quite a few in reserve. Members will automatically get access to the complete back catalogue.
- Q&As / AMAs: in addition to the lectures I plan to run a few discussion sessions, sometimes with colleagues, focussing on new discoveries, new books, or other topics that come across my radar or get suggested to me.
Level 3, Gold (£25.99 per month)
- All the above perks.
- Private online chats – small-group or one-to-one discussions online to discuss any particular topic you want to know more about.
- Meet ups: to visit Egyptian objects or collections in the UK perhaps with a drink afterwards!
Schedule
In the next few months, I’ll be giving a first few lectures to test things out, as follows:
- 8 May 2024, Searching for the Missing Tombs of Egypt – freely accessible to all.
- 10 July 2024, Amenhotep and Akhenaten – freely accessible to all.
- 7 August 2024, Pyramid Mythbusting – freely accessible to all.
- 5 September 2024, How to Read Hieroglyphs (and the Abydos kinglists) – *Lapis and Gold members only.*
- October 2024 onwards, one new talk per month for lapis and gold members only, occasional talks freely accessible to all.
Alabaster membership will be available from May 2024 and members in this category will be able to enjoy the benefits of badges, emojis and shout-outs from that time onwards. Lapis and Gold memberships won’t be available until September 2024 when the first of the first of the members-only lectures – How to Read Hieroglyphs – comes around.
Background
Some of you might have seen the short video I posted recently, ‘A Postcard from Luxor’ which served as very preliminary announcement about the lectures I plan to give online from summer 2024 onwards.
Lecturing online became the biggest part of my work during the COVID lockdowns and has remained very important to me ever since. I wrote about this as the pandemic finally seemed to be coming to an end in early 2022, here.
Up to now, I have always used Zoom for this. It’s familiar to me and most of my audience, it’s easy to use, and allows me to set up an automated registration process and to charge a fee for each talk. However, since I began making recordings of some of my talks available via YouTube I’ve discovered there is another (bigger?) audience for what I do out there, and since Zoom now charges a much higher fee for its services while broadcasting via YouTube is free, I’ve begun to think about shifting over. I used a combination of Zoom and YouTube to broadcast my talk ‘Egyptology in an Hour’ last summer as an experiment to see how this might work and it seemed to go well, with a good number attending the live event, and more watching the recording – which was automatically and immediately available, afterwards and ever since.
The only snag for me was that YouTube offered no option to charge a registration fee, so in order that I can continue to earn something of a living from this kind of thing I’ve decided to experiment with a different way of doing things from this summer onwards.
Summer 2024 Onwards
Previously, in order to join one of my talks, you had to pay the mandatory registration fee of £6. In future you’ll now have a couple of options as regards how you access the talks, and how you support me if that’s something you’d like to do.
Some of my talks will be freely available, others will initially only be available to channel members.
The freely available talks will be just that, available to all for free, but for anyone who would like to make a contribution in return for access to the talk, as a way of supporting me, you can send a one-off contribution via the ‘super thanks’ button beneath the video. This gives you the option to select an amount to send (and I’ll be sure to let you know what amount I’d recommend!).
The other talks will be available only to members who pay a monthly subscription fee (which you can cancel at any time). Once the memberships are set up a a ‘Join’ button will appear next to the ‘Subscribe’ button on my channel.
Members will get access to the live broadcasts, which is when you’ll be able to send your hellos, questions, comments etc just as in the past with the Zoom events, and to the recordings for the first three months after that. In order to make sure members are getting good value for their money I plan to do one new lecture every month for at least six months, and longer if it seems this new way of doing things is working.
Scheduling
I will try to stick to a fairly regular schedule for the monthly talks but it’s likely that other commitments will get in the way from time to time. I’ll aim for something like the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm UK time (= 1pm EST) which I hope will suit as many of you as any one time possibly could. Of course the live broadcasts will be the time when I can interact with everyone, talk about the weather etc., but members will be able to watch the recordings at any time, and will still be able to leave comments, which I will reply to as soon as I can.
Currency
You’ll have noticed that I’ve given the (provisional) membership prices in pounds sterling. I think, depending on where you are in the world, the price will be converted to your local currency, and presumably rounded up or down, but I’m not sure about this yet. If anyone knows please get in touch!
Forthcoming Talks
In my little video announcement I committed to giving talks on the following subjects (I find making announcements like this is a great way of forcing myself to get things done!):
Amenhotep and Akhenaten – 10 July 2024, free to all.
Pyramid Mythbusting – 7 August 2024, free to all.
How to Read Hieroglyphs (and the Abydos kinglists) – 5 September 2024, members only.
I have a few more ideas for future talks as well. I’d like to cover a few parts of Egyptian history that I haven’t dealt with in any great detail before, as follows:
THE FIRST PHARAOH – Narmer and his famous palette
MISERABLE PHARAOHS – tough times in the Middle Kingdom
A GLORIOUS SCORE DRAW – Ramesses II and the world’s first peace treaty
TAUSRET and THE CHANCELLOR – the end of the 19th Dynasty
THE LAST PAGAN – Nesmeterakhem and the last ever hieroglyphic inscription
And I’d like to look in detail at a few monuments that particularly interest me including one or two non-royal tombs in Thebes, the evolution of the tombs in the Valley of Kings, and the enigmatic Osireion in Abydos.
I hope you’ll find there are a few things here that are of interest but of course I’d like to hear your suggestions too, and this is something we can discuss in future sessions online.
Getting Going
The first thing I want to do is to test the broadcast set up via YouTube, and to practice getting into the habit of mentioning all the things good YouTubers mention – the ‘like’ and ‘subscribe’ buttons, super thanks, and the forthcoming memberships.
I hope you’ll be able to join me as I’d really appreciate your feedback and encouragement! So here’s a date for your diaries:
SEARCHING FOR THE MISSING TOMBS OF EGYPT
Wednesday 8 May 2024, 6.00 pm UK time (= 1.00 pm EST)
Live via YouTube – click here
It’s incredible to think that so many of the tombs of the pharaohs of Egypt – who altogether ruled for over three thousand years – have survived and been discovered by archaeologists. Most of those that haven’t survived belonged to kings about whom we know very little and who perhaps ruled only for a short time, or during periods of instability. But there are conspicuous absences – tombs that belonged to great and well-known historical figures that no longer exist, or perhaps just haven’t been found yet… This is the story of the ‘missing’ tombs of Imhotep, Amenhotep I, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Herihor, the kings of the glorious Saite Period, and even Alexander the Great and Cleopatra. What would they have been like, what treasures would they have contained, where were they, and could they still await discovery?
See you soon! 😊
Dr Chris Naunton 