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The present work is the result of the First International Chariot Conference, jointly organised by the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) and the American University in Cairo (AUC) (30 November to 2 December 2012). The intention of the conference was to make a broad assessment of the current state of knowledge about chariots in Egypt and the Near East, and to provide a forum for discussion. A wide variety of papers are included, ranging from overviews to more detailed studies focusing on a specific topic. These include philology, iconography, archaeology, engineering, history, and conservation. The book is of interest to scholars as well as anyone with an interest in ancient technology, transportation, or warfare.
The ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts form a corpus of ritual spells written on the inside of coffins from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1650 BCE). Thus accompanying the deceased in a very concrete sense, the spells are part of a long Egyptian tradition of equipping the dead with ritual texts ensuring the transition from the state of a living human being to that of a deceased ancestor. The texts present a view of death as entailing threats to the function of the body, often conceptualised as bodily fragmentation or dysfunction. In the transformation of the deceased, the restoration of these bodily dysfunctions is of paramount importance, and the texts provide detailed accounts of the ritual empowe...
Lotus and Laurel brings together a wealth of essays in celebration of Paul John Frandsen, who has had a distinguished career as a scholar of ancient Egyptian language and religion. The contributors are friends, colleagues, or former students, and all are leading authorities in Egyptology. Evoking Frandsen's wide range of interests, they touch on a breadth of topics, including religious thought and representation; social questions of gender, kinship, and temple slavery; and studies of grammar and etymology. More than a tribute to this important scholar in Egyptology, Lotus and Laurel is a window onto some of the most important work going on now in the field.
The term ‘canonicity’ implies the recognition that the domain of literature and of the library is also a cultural and political one, related to various forms of identity formation, maintenance, and change. Scribes and benefactors ‘create’ canon in as much as they teach, analyze, preserve, prom¬ulgate and change ‘canonical’ texts according to prevailing norms. From early on, texts from the written traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were accumulated, codified, and to some extent canonized, as various collections developed mainly in the environment of the temple and the palace. These written traditions represent sets of formal and informal cultures that all speak in their own ways of canonicity, normativity, and other forms of cultural expertise. Some forms of literature were used not only in scholarly contexts, but also in political ones, and they served purposes of identity formation. This volume addresses the interrelations between various forms of ‘canon’ and identity formation in different time periods, genres, regions, and contexts, as well as the application of contemporary conceptions of ‘canon’ to ancient texts.
The sixth annual Current Research in Egyptology symposium took place from 6th-8th January 2005 at the University of Cambridge. Although the topics covered by the papers were many and varied, if there is a general theme it would be that of exploring the borders and parameters of the discipline of Egyptology.
Excavating the Mind deals with the relationship between the material culture of humans, i.e. our technologies, arts and environments, and our mental worlds. Emphasizing the close interdependence of mind and matter, the volume resonates with current developments within sociology, psychology and the cognitive sciences, yet it aims to supplement the focus on modern, predominantly Western societies and individuals with studies of different cultural contexts and processes in the evolutionary and historical past as well as the ethnographic present. With contributions from cognitive and social archaeology as well as anthropology, semiotics and the history of religion, the book combines well-illustrated case studies covering a wide chronological and geographic span - from Neolithic Europe to the present-day South Pacific - with incisive discussion of particular theoretical issues in the study of mind and material culture. Excavating the Mind is an original contribution to the multidisciplinary debate on the uniquely human entanglement of complex material cultures and mental worlds.
The concept of theory of mind (ToM), a hot topic in cognitive psychology for the past twenty-five years, has gained increasing importance in the fields of linguistics and pragmatics. However, even though the relationship between ToM and verbal communication is now recognized, the extent, causality and full implications of this connection remain mostly to be explored. This book presents a comprehensive discussion of the interface between language, communication, and theory of mind, and puts forward an innovative proposal regarding the role of discourse connectives for this interface. The proposed analysis of connectives is tested from the perspective of their acquisition, using empirical methods such as corpus analysis and controlled experiments, thus placing the study of connectives within the emerging framework of experimental pragmatics.
The first comprehensive and up-to-date overview of what we know about the use of copper by the ancient Egyptians and Nubians, from the Predynastic through the Early Dynastic until the end of the Second Intermediate Period (c. 4000-1600 BC). The monograph presents a story, based on the analysis of available evidence, a synchronic and diachronic reconstruction of the development and changes of the chaîne opératoire of copper and copper alloy artefacts. The book argues that Egypt was not isolated from the rest of the ancient world and that popular notions of its "primitive" technology are not based on facts.
The basic premise of the book at hand is that there is meaning to be 'excavated' (in both meanings of the word) from Christian responses to pagan sculpture in the period from the fourth to the sixth century. More than mindless acts of religious violence by fanatical mobs, these responses are revelatory of contemporary conceptions of images and the different ways in which the material manifestations of the pagan past could be negotiated in Late Antiquity. Statues were important to the social, political and religious life of cities across the Mediterranean, as well as part of a culture of representation that was intricately bound to bodily taxonomies and visual practices.
In Medicine in Ancient Assur Troels Pank Arbøll offers a microhistorical study of a single exorcist named Kiṣir-Aššur who practiced medical and magical healing in the ancient city of Assur (modern northern Iraq) in the 7th century BCE. The book provides the first detailed analysis of a healer’s education and practice in ancient Mesopotamia based on at least 73 texts assigned to specific stages of his career. By drawing on a microhistorical framework, the study aims at significantly improving our understanding of the functional aspects of texts in their specialist environment. Furthermore, the work situates Kiṣir-Aššur as one of the earliest healers in world history for whom we have such details pertaining to his career originating from his own time.