Ancient Egyptian Figured Ostraca
Ancient Egyptian Figured Ostraca

Author:

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13:

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Facsimile reissue of Anthea Page’s 1983 catalog of 82 ostraca held in the Petrie Collection, London. Ostraca are flakes of limestone or broken sherds of pottery used essentially as 'notepads' for private letters; laundry lists; records of purchases; roughly inscribed images of people, birds, and animals; and copies of literary works. In Ancient Egypt they reveal the artist-craftsman at practice, leisure and play. Apprentices, for instance, copied scenes to improve techniques; artists drew pictures to amuse, perhaps with satirical images and caricatures, or made measured studies for finished works. A wide range of trivial examples survive, together with more serious devotional, votive and dedicatory pieces.

Using Ostraca in the Ancient World
Using Ostraca in the Ancient World

Author: Clementina Caputo

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-12-16

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 3110712954

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Throughout Egypt’s long history, pottery sherds and flakes of limestone were commonly used for drawings and short-form texts in a number of languages. These objects are conventionally called ostraca, and thousands of them have been and continue to be discovered. This volume highlights some of the methodologies that have been developed for analyzing the archaeological contexts, material aspects, and textual peculiarities of ostraca.

Manuscripts and Archives
Manuscripts and Archives

Author: Alessandro Bausi

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 3110541572

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Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).