Eric Lapp - Lychnologist

Eric C. Lapp holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Near Eastern Archaeology from Duke University. He was further educated at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen and as a Fulbright Scholar, at the University of Cologne in Germany. His area of study is ancient Jewish art and archaeology in the Diaspora, and ancient technology, particularly with respect to ceramics and metallurgy. As a lychnologist, or ancient lighting specialist, Lapp specializes in the identification, dating, and sourcing of clay lamps manufactured throughout the Mediterranean and Near East. He was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. As a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia, he explored the island’s Jewish antiquity. Lapp is a senior staff member of excavations at Sepphoris, Israel, where the “Mona Lisa of the Galilee” and Nile Mosaics were discovered, and in Jordan, at the Roman legionary fortress of el-Lejjun and the Nabatean port of Aila on the Red Sea. He has contributed a number of articles to scholarly journals, books, and encyclopedias, and more recently translated the French commentaries for The Essential Classics: An Anthology of Greco-Roman Literature published by the Paris-based house, Les Belles Lettres. He lives with his wife and two sons in Baltimore.