The chapters of Middle Kingdom Palace Culture and Its Echoes in the Provinces discuss the degree of influence that provincial developments played in reshaping the Egyptian state and culture during the Middle Kingdom. Contributors to the volume are Egyptologists from around the world who have developed their research following a conference held at the University of Jaén in Spain.
For the ancient Egyptians, the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1700 BC) was a classical period of art, history and literature. The Twelfth Dynasty was one of the strongest ever to rule on the banks of the Nile: some of its kings were later worshipped as local gods, and were made famous by classical Greek authors. Yet Egyptologists tend not to look beyond the extraordinary royal sculpture and literary masterpieces of the time. Although the picture is fragmentary, as with any archaeological record, the last two hundred years of exploration and excavation have revealed much of the splendour of the period. This book examines the evidence for the culture, history and society of both central and provincial Egypt at the time, revealing the wealth of the entire country. In this second edition, Wolfram Grajetzki incorporates recent discoveries, discussions and publications which have emerged over the intervening fifteen years, including new excavation reports for the mastabas at Lisht and excavations at Abydos. Too often overshadowed by the better-preserved architecture of other periods, Middle Kingdom Egypt emerges for the reader as a fascinating age in its own right.
Written in the tradition of historians like Stacy Schiff and Amanda Foreman who find modern lessons in ancient history, this provocative narrative explores the lives of five remarkable pharaohs who ruled Egypt with absolute power, shining a new light on the country's 3,000-year empire and its meaning today.
A new perspective on the dynamics of dynastic rule in the southernmost province of Egypt, from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom The First Upper Egyptian nome, with its capital, Elephantine, was important in ancient times, as it stood on the southern border between Egypt and the Nubian provinces above the First Cataract. Since 2008, Alejandro Jiménez-Serrano has led an archaeological mission at the necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa, where Elephantine’s high officials are buried. In Descendants of a Lesser God, he draws on textual records and archaeological data, together with new evidence from his work at the tombs, to cast fresh historiographical light on the dynastic dynamics of these ruling elites. Jiménez-Serrano analyzes the origin of the local elites of Elephantine, and their role in trade and international relations with Nubia and neighboring regions, from the end of the Old Kingdom to the end of the Middle Kingdom. He explores the development of these power groups, organized as they were in complex households, which in many ways emulated the functioning of the royal court. Delving deeply into the funerary world, he also highlights the relationship between social memory and political legitimacy through his examination of the mortuary cult of a late Old Kingdom governor of Elephantine, Heqaib, who was transformed into a local divinity and later claimed as the mythic ancestor of the ruling family of Elephantine. The history of ancient Egypt has traditionally been written from a court perspective. This new history of a strategically important region not only modifies existing perceptions of provincial life in the Middle Kingdom among the elites, but also introduces new evidence to support more complex and detailed reconstructions of the dynastic families in power.
This work explores the use of a time chart based on generations as a way to understand history. A sole reliance on yearly dating tends to obscure the historical reality and deter us from further exploration. However, patterns are revealed if we number generations, and we become intrigued by the connections and hypotheses raised. The author uses 15-year intervals to date events and mark when people turn 30 and tend to enter history. The 15-year generational interval was first used by the medieval historian, Bede, and later advocated by Ortega E Gasset, a leading Spanish philosopher of the 20th century. In brief, the phases of history found are: 1) A partly invisible beginning phase; 0-15 generations; 2) An establishment phase at 15/20 generations; 3) A consolidating and opening up stage at 30 generations; 4) A crisis and creativity phase at 40 generations; 5) An empire and inclusionary phase at 50 generations; and 6) Renewal or rigidification phase at the 60 generational node. Importantly, special attention is given to the often neglected 30th generational period, in which an openess to beauty and light prevade. Interestingly, these phases also resonate with the human life cycle. The tour of cultures covered includes ancient Egypt, Israel-Judah, Rome, and the Medieval-Modern. Taking us into contemporary times, America/United States is addressed in a second volume to this work.You are invited to go on an intriguing journey in which generational patterning becomes a Rosetta key for understanding history.
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.
The organization and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as chiefdom, complex chiefdom and state, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organization, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organization, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as marginal populations that cultivated specialized skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states. This book explores such small-scale socio-political organizations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organization of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.
Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Third Edition covers the whole range of the history of ancient Egypt from the Prehistoric Period until the end of Roman rule in Egypt based on the latest information provided by academic scholars and archaeologists. This is done through a revised introduction on the history of ancient Egypt, the dictionary section has over 1,000 dictionary entries on historical figures, geographical locations, important institutions and other facets of ancient Egyptian civilization. This is followed by two appendices one of which is a chronological table of Egyptian rulers and governors and the other a list of all known museums which contain ancient Egyptian objects. The volume ends with a detailed bibliography of Egyptian historical periods, archaeological sites, general topics such as pyramids, languages and arts and crafts and the publications of Egyptian material in museums throughout the world.
In this book, Richard Bussmann presents a fresh overview of ancient Egyptian society and culture in the age of the pyramids. He addresses key themes in the comparative research of early complex societies, including urbanism, funerary culture, temple ritual, kingship, and the state, and explores how ideas and practices were exchanged between ruling elites and local communities in provincial Egypt. Unlike other studies of ancient Egypt, this book adopts an anthropological approach that places people at the centre of the analysis. Bussmann covers a range of important themes in cross-cultural debates, such as materiality, gender, non-elite culture, and the body. He also offers new perspectives on social diversity and cultural cohesion, based on recent discoveries. His study vividly illustrates how our understanding of ancient Egyptian society benefits from the application of theoretical concepts in archaeology and anthropology to the interpretation of the evidence.
This volume of collected studies takes stock of most recent developments in Egyptology and the Digital Humanities, considering future directions for the application of new technologies in Egyptology. The book presents the results of an international conference held in 2019 at Indiana University – Bloomington, in which Egyptologists and digital humanists with interest in Egyptology gathered in 2019 to present current projects in 3D modeling, virtual and augmented reality, game technology, digital pedagogy, database projects, computational and corpus linguistics and E-publications. Those projects, along with a selection of others that were not presented in Bloomington, are now described and discussed in this volume.
