Dr. Heidi Köpp-Junk is Assistant Professor in Egyptian Archaeology at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw, and lecturer at the Georg-August University at Göttingen. She studied Egyptology, Prehistory and Ethnology at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen and got her Ph.D. with the thesis “Travel in Pharaonic Egypt” (supervisors: Prof. Dr. F. Junge; Prof. Dr. G. Dreyer, Director of the German Archaeological Institute).
Since then, she has worked at the universities of Göttingen, Münster, Trier, and Tübingen, and for different museums for excavations and exhibitions of Egyptological objects (British Museum London, Roemer and Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Landesmuseum Hannover, Federal State Museum for Prehistory Halle/Saale, World Cultural Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte, Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art Luxembourg). Since 1988 she has been excavating in Germany (Glauberg, Northeim, Einbeck) and since 1990 in Egypt (Dahshur, Elephantine, Buto, Sakkara, Qantir, Abydos, Athribis) for several institutions, such as the German Archaeological Institute Cairo (DAI). She published about 120 scientific articles and books, several of them on travel and mobility, transport, locomotion, and chariots. Her monography about music in ancient Egypt (2023) is the first one in German after the one of Hans Hickmann in 1961. Her book „Nofretete auf dem Streitwagen - Ikonographische und textliche Belege für Frauen auf Streitwagen in Ägypten“ / “Nefertiti on the chariot – iconographic and textual evidence of women on chariots in ancient Egypt” is the first monography about women on chariots at all.
Her research interests lie in travel, mobility, carrying chairs, wagons, carts, chariots, as well as dewatering systems, gender studies, and music archeology. As a trained singer she performs songs from ancient Egypt, composed by her from hieroglyphic texts like pHarris 500 and pChester Beatty while playing a replica of a lute from the time of Tutankhamun and other instruments (sistrum, lyre, rattle, frame drum etc.).