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The Pyramid Age represents the first of several highpoints in ancient Egypt’s long history. But critical questions remain about the period, its social structure and economic organization, and the long-term implications of its artistic achievements. On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Journal of Egyptian History, The University of British Columbia, Harvard University, and Brill Academic Publishers, Boston, held a conference at Harvard University on April 26, 2012. A distinguished group of Egyptological scholars from around the world gathered to consider new perspectives on the Pyramid Age; the results are presented here.
In this volume, Maxim N. Kupreyev explores the intricate stories of Egyptian-Coptic demonstratives and adverbs, personal, relative pronouns and definite articles. Applying the concepts of distance, contrast, and joint attention, the book offers a panorama of competing deictic systems in Old Kingdom Egypt. It singles out dialectal differences and outlines the history of deixis not as a linear development, but as a competition of regional variants that gradually attain normative status. The results of the study reconsider the evolution of Ancient Egyptian, its periodization and its embedding in the Afro-Asiatic linguistic context.
This book spins around the convening idea of variability to offer fourteen new views into the Pyramid and Coffin Texts and related materials that overarch archaeology, philology, linguistics, writing studies, religious studies and social history by applying innovative approaches such as agency, politeness, material philology and object-based studies, and under a strong empirical focus. In this book, you will find from a previously unpublished coffin or a reinterpretation of the so-called ‘Letters to the Dead’ to graffiti’s interaction with monumental inscriptions, ‘subatomic’ studies in the spellings of the Osiris’ name or the puzzles of text transmission, among other novel topics.
In Visualizing Coregency, Lisa Saladino Haney explores the practice of co-rule during Egypt’s 12th Dynasty and the role of royal statuary in expressing the dynamics of shared power. Though many have discussed coregencies, few have examined how such a concept was expressed visually. Haney presents both a comprehensive accounting of the evidence for coregency during the 12th Dynasty and a detailed analysis of the full corpus of royal statuary attributed to Senwosret III and Amenemhet III. This study demonstrates that by the reign of Senwosret III the central government had developed a wide-ranging visual, textual, and religious program that included a number of distinctive portrait types designed to convey the central political and cultural messages of the dynasty.
In The Performative Structure: Ritualizing the Pyramid of Pepy I, Nils Billing investigates the ancient Egyptian pyramid complex as a performative structure, ritualized through the operative faculty inherent in monumental architecture, text, and image. The main body of research is given over to an analysis of the Pyramid Texts found in the pyramid of king Pepy I of the Sixth Dynasty (ca 2300 BCE). It is demonstrated that the texts were distributed on distinct space-bound thematic and ritual levels in order to perpetuate a cultic activity from which the lord of the tomb could be transformed by moving through the different chambers and corridors towards the exit. Just as the decoration program of the mortuary temple once delineated the ritual and ideological structure of the royal mortuary cult, the corpus of texts distributed in the pyramid provided a monumentalized performative structure that effectuated the perennial rebirth for its owner.
Ancient Egyptian Portraiture: History of an Idea concerns the origin, nature, and removal, the unravelling and explanation of the impasse pertaining to the definition, assessment, and judgement of Ancient Egyptian portraiture. Condensed in the syntagm different from ours, this impasse arises from the polarisation and dichotomy of idealism and realism which characterise the three main Egyptological definitions of portraiture. In offering a transcendental definition of art and portraiture that is anthropologically valid, the overarching aim of this book is to challenge assessments of Egyptian art and portraiture based on historically particularistic concepts that are foreign to its cultural premises and development.
In Excavations at the Seila Pyramid and Fag el-Gamous Cemetery, the excavation team provides crucial information about the Old Kingdom and Graeco-Roman Egypt. While both periods have been heavily studied, Kerry Muhlestein and his contributors provide new archaeological information that will help shape thinking about these eras. The construction and ritual features of the early Fourth Dynasty Seila Pyramid represents innovations that would influence royal funerary cult for hundreds of years. Similarly, as one of the largest excavated cemeteries of Egypt, Fag el-Gamous helps paint a picture of multi-cultural life in the Fayoum of Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Excavations there provide a statistically impactful understanding of funerary customs under the influence of new cultures and religion.
In The Iconography of Family Members in Egypt’s Elite Tombs of the Old Kingdom,, Jing Wen offers a comprehensive survey of how ancient Egyptians portrayed their family members in the reliefs of an elite tomb. Through the analysis of the depiction of family members, this book investigates familial relations, the funerary cult of the dead, ancestor worship, and relevant texts. It provides a new hypothesis and perspective that would update our understanding of the Egyptian funerary practice and familial ideology. The scenes of family members are not a record of family history but language games of the tomb owner that convey specific meaning to those who enter the chapel despite time and space.
The reign of the “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten—the so-called Amarna Period—witnessed an unprecedented attack on the cult of Amun, King of the Gods, with his cult center at ancient Thebes (modern Luxor). A program to reinstate Amun to pre-eminence in the traditional pantheon was instituted by Akhenaten’s successors Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemhab. Damaged reliefs and inscriptions were restored and new statues of Amun and his consorts Mut and Amunet commissioned to replace those destroyed under Akhenaten. In this study, over 60 statues and fragments of statues attributable to the post-Amarna Period on the basis of an inscription, physiognomy, and/or stylistic analysis are discussed, as well as others that have been incorrectly assigned to the era.