You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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...
How our understanding of the ancient Egyptian afterlife was shaped by Christianity. Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians' obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Rune Nyord shows, even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the e...
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.
This Element offers a new approach to ancient Egyptian images informed by interdisciplinary work in archaeology, anthropology, and art history. Sidestepping traditional perspectives on Egyptian art, the Element focuses squarely on the ontological status of the image in ancient thought and experience. To accomplish this, section 2 takes up a number of central Egyptian terms for images, showing that a close examination of their etymology and usage can help resolve long-standing question on Egyptian imaging practices. Section 3 discusses ancient Egyptian experiences of materials and manufacturing processes, while section 4 categorizes and discusses the different purposes and functions for which images were created. The Element as a whole thus offers a concise introduction to ancient Egyptian imaging practices for an interdisciplinary readership, while at the same introducing new ways of thinking about familiar material for the Egyptological reader.
Papers from a seminar held at the University of Copenhagen in September 2006. Contents: A New Look at the Conception of the Human Being in Ancient Egypt (John Gee); 2) Between Identity and Agency in Ancient Egyptian Ritual (Harold M. Hays); 3) Material Agency, Attribution and Experience of Agency in Ancient Egypt: The case of New Kingdom private temple statues (Annette Kjølby); 4) Self-perception and Self-assertion in the Portrait of Senwosret III: New methods for reading a face ((Maya Müller); 5) Taking Phenomenology to Heart: Some heuristic remarks on studying ancient Egyptian embodied experience (Rune Nyord); 6) Anger and Agency: The role of the emotions in Demotic and earlier narratives (John Tait); 7) Time and Space in Ancient Egypt: The importance of the creation of abstraction (David A. Warburton); Index of Egyptian and Greek words and expressions.
Uses primary evidence to ask anthropological questions about kinship and families in ancient Egyptian society.
Concepts in Middle Kingdom Funerary Culture presents a collection of archaeological and philological papers discussing how ancient Egyptians thought, and modern scholars may think, about Egyptian funerary practices of the early 2nd millennium BCE. Targeting the concepts used by modern scholars, the papers address both general methodological questions of how concepts should be developed and used and more specific ones about the history and presuppositions behind particular Egyptological concepts. In so doing, the volume brings to the fore occasionally problematic intellectual baggage that have hindered understanding, as well highlighting new promising avenues of research in ancient Egyptian funerary culture in the Middle Kingdom and more broadly. "New and insightful suggestions are made, many of which challenge the basic frames of reference of Western Egyptological study, from funerary practice to issues of identity. The methodological models should be of considerable interest to those studying aspects of the HB and ancient Levant related to funerary culture, where studies have often tended towards the etic." -David Beadle, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44.5 (2020)
Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts. Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.
This is the publication of the sarcophagus of the mayor of Thebes, Hunefer, in office under Ramses II. To date, the granite sarcophagus in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has received little research attention despite being a large scale monument. The book provides a presentation of the sarcophagus and its place in space and time.
This short volume discusses a group of glass objects kept in the British Museum that date to the Egyptian New Kingdom (1550–1069 BC) and are commonly referred to as 'ear plugs' or 'ear studs'. Ancient Egyptian ear studs from variety of materials appear in the archaeological record and are usually depicted as worn with a convex dome to the front. However, there is evidence to suggest that the glass objects discussed in this volume, and which are similar, but not equal, in shape to ear studs, were not designed as ear jewelery, but that they actually functioned as beads. The objects are flat-fronted and pierced latitudinally. The piercing, which is related to the manufacture of the objects on a metal rod,would have enabled the objects to be threaded and to be suspended vertically, either as parts of garments or as parts of bead chains.