This monograph explores the unity of the modern concepts of magic and science in Egyptian medicine. After an initial chapter analysing the types of sources with which any study of this subject must engage, the author looks at how the Egyptians conceptualised magic, how Egyptian doctors arrived at diagnoses, and at treatments, including medicines, spells and amulets.

This study investigates the drivers for the development of the elite Late Period tombs of the necropoleis of Memphis. It studies their conceptual basis in the context of the social and political situation of the Late Period. It examines the landscape of Memphis and explores the geographic, geological and man-made features that encouraged the creation of a sacred landscape with a view to discovering what features made this a desirable place for the building of tombs and why Late Period clusters of tombs were built in some parts of that landscape but not in others; it also considers the significance of their alignment. It sets out to discover what religious, social or ancestral factors made the elite choose the location of the individual tombs, what determined their structure and how they relate to older as well as contemporary structures. Finally, the reason for the positions of the different burial grounds of Memphis, and the interrelation between them, is explored in order to establish the socio-political factors influencing that choice.

The concepts of territory and territoriality are analysed on the basis of anthropological and archaeological data. It is assumed that territory and territoriality are more complex concepts than simple space occupation. For the case of Egypt in the Old Kingdom, the author of this volume considers different variables related to the ideology and to the socio-political and economic systems of the Egyptian state. Its consolidation, the royal power legitimisation and that of the elite, and the socio-political and economic system are here considered from their unification in the Early Dynastic period, to the Old Kingdom, when the state expanded and its political and ideological maturity was achieved.

Social Aspects of Ancient Egyptian Domestic Architecture Aby Aikaterini Koltsida How important is the study of the domestic architecture of a society in order to reveal the everyday life of its inhabitants? How significant is the space within which people live and interact in order to understand the structure and function of a family? How much does the space influence the relationships developed among the people living under the same roof? Is there a characteristic house plan to cover the everyday basic needs of an ancient Egyptian? In this study, the author looks at the function and use of a domestic unit and the everyday life of its occupants.

The Nile Valley civilization, which spanned a period from c. 5000 B.C. to the early centuries A.D., was one of the earliest created by humankind. This handy reference provides a comprehensive overview of more than five millennia of Egyptian history and archeology, from predynastic times to the Old and New Kingdoms to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Accessible, authoritative, and clearly organized, the Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt offers an engaging look at a culture whose art and architecture, religion, and medicine would come to form the basis of Western Civilization.
The thematically arranged chapters allow readers easy access to particular topics, including historical background, geography, government, religion, funerary customs, architecture, literature, the military, the economy, and everyday life. Drawing on written sources dating from c. 3100 B.C. and historical evidence including monuments, artifacts, inscriptions, and preserved human remains, Rosalie David covers everything from the Sun Cult and the pyramids to the arrival and spread of Christianity. The Handbook contains 112 maps, photographs, and original line drawings, a chronological table, an appendix listing museums with Egyptian collections, and extensive bibliographies included with each chapter.
Combining both archeological and historical sources, the Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt provides all the essential information required by anyone interested in Egyptian history, archaeology, religions, or culture.
In this new edition, the author discusses the latest findings in areas that are currently at the forefront of Egyptological research. A new chapter on Egyptology describes the history of thefield, the results of the latest excavations, and the techniques involved in new scientific studies, such as DNA analysis and the tracing of disease patterns. This newly revised edition takes into account the discoveries of the last few years that have led Egyptologists to change their perspective on some aspects of life in ancient Egypt, including a reevaluation of the purpose and functions of the Egyptian temples, the role of the Great Royal Wife, and the possible date and nature of the Biblical Exodus.

This work examines in detail a specific group of inscribed material from the Memphite necropolis. The material dates to the late Old Kingdom- Herakleopolitan Period, and comes from tombs belonging to officials of various ranks and social standing. Some of the stelae and other inscribed fragments, offering tables, side pieces, and blocks have been published, while others are looked at here for the first time. This book, however, is the first work to bring all this material together as comprehensively as possible in order to fully assess its extent and importance. It investigates the distribution of the Herakleopolitan Period cemeteries in the vast necropolis of Memphis; analyses each individual cemetery and its development through this period; and explores the architectural remains of the chapels of the period to cast light on their design. A major focus is the examination of the tomb stelae, their orientation, development, and their inscriptions...

In this study the author approaches the realm of private religion in Egypt some 3,300 years ago. The two broad research questions that frame this study are: What was the structure of the private religious landscape at Amarna (Central Egypt, on the Nile), and what were the ideas that shaped this landscape? The starting point is a corpus of objects and structures from settlement remains at one site, Amarna, the location of Egypts capital for a brief period (c.350 330 BCE) towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

This volume completes the presentation of all University College London's Lahun papyri. Over half of the great mass of papyrus fragments retrieved by Petrie from the Middle-Kingdom town-site near al-Lahun (Fayum region) comprises administrative records and the authors have divided the analyses into items for which Petrie-Griffith lot numbers are known, items for which Petrie-Griffith lot numbers are not known, and items of less determinate content not included in other series. The work includes a CD showing colour photographs of the original material.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Contents: Egypt on its Way to an Early State: The Nile Delta and the Valley (Tatjana A. Sherkova); Ancient Memphis and the Helleno-Roman World: A Short Note (Galina A. Belova); Among the Hidden Treasures of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens: Searching for Forgotten Mummies (Amanda-Alice Maravelia); Les Figurines Obscenes de la Collection Egyptienne du Musee Municipal de Limoges (Ashraf Alexandre Sadek); From the History of Archaeology: The Destruction of the Late Antiquity Necropolises in Egypt reconsidered (Maya Mueller); Knowledge Engineering at the Russian Institute for Egyptology in Cairo and at the CES/RAS, Moscow (Edward Loring); The Shifting Foundation of Ancient Chronology (Leo Depuydt); Sothic Dates in Egyptian Chronology (Anne-Sophie Goddio-von Bomhard); Looped Pile Weaves at the Benaki cation of Techniques and the Technology Museum: More Observations on the Classi of Textiles (Sophia Tsourinaki); Origins of the Sd-Festival: On the History of a Hypothesis (Alexej A. Krol).

This is the first report on survey work and excavations carried out by the Sudan Antiquitites Service, supported by UNESCO, between 1960 and 1963 in the northernmost region of Sudanese Nubia, an area threatened by dam construction. William Adams describes the study area, the methodology of the work carried out there, its objectives and priorities, and previous work undertaken. What follows is essentially a catalogue of some of the 262 sites recorded and investigated (which included sites dating from the Neolithic to early modern period), focusing here on those of Meroitic and Ballana age. The descriptions are arranged according to site type - monumental, habitation, other non-mortuary sites, mortuary sites - and location, from north to south.

The author's aim is to present a study which determines the role of a chantress in ancient Egypt. Although both men and women were known to hold the title, it is the women that form the focus of this study. The number of people that held the title of chantress, and a previous lack of research means a relatively large proportion of the population of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate period have been neglected, owing to the lesser status of the position compared to more high-ranking, and thus well-researched titles. This study offers an impression of the chantress as a more diverse title than has previously been imagined, taking into account and defining the differences between musical and linguistic roles.

Excavations of Predynastic and early Dynastic cemeteries in Abydos revealed examples of cylinder seal impressions which depicted geometric symbols, rows of animals and single figures or objects, such as boats or birds. This detailed study focuses on finds from each tomb complex in turn before Hill places these objects in their cultural context, assessing the significance of seals as magical objects, as works of art and as administrative tools. The volume goes on to consider comparative examples from Nubia and parallels in Mesopotamia where the use of seals was far more widespread during this period. Finally, Hill considers the function of seals, what they were sealing and what this reveals about foreign trade.

Following a successful inaugural event at the University of Oxford and an expanded second at the University of Liverpool, the Third Symposium for Current Research in Egyptology was held in December 2001, at the University of Birmingham. The symposium was again successful in bringing together UK-based graduate students of Egyptology to provide an opportunity to disseminate the results of their research. It also served to encourage communication between an otherwise disparate group of students spread across the various Egyptological institutions throughout the country. Indeed, speakers came from nine different institutions and the papers presented illustrated well the broad range of topics currently being studied throughout the United Kingdom. T he topics of the 9 featured papers include: The Lotus Roborn: the creation and distribution of the Description de L'Egypte; The arrival of the horse in Egypt: new approaches and a hypothesis; Aspects of the Hyksos' role in Egyptian society from the artistic evidence; Some thoughts on the social organisation of dockyards during the new kingdom; Egyptian blue: where, when, how?; The specialness of science: it's all in the mind; Crossing the night: the depiction of mythological landscapes in the Am Duat of the New Kingdom Royal Necropolis; Trends in burial evidence: evaluating expectations for the regional and temporal distribution of mortuary behaviour in Predynastic Egypt; Representations of Hathor and Mut in the Hibis temple.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHORS OF FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS AND THE ORION MYSTERY 'An exciting book . . . deservedly a bestseller' SPECTATOR ___________________________________________ In Keeper of Genesis, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval present a tour de force of historical and scientific detective work: * When and where did history begin? * When was the genesis of civilisation in Egypt? * How and why were the Great Sphinx and the three pyramids of Giza designed to serve as parts of an immense three-dimensional model of the sky of 'First Time'? * What is contained in the rectangular chamber that seismic surveys have located in the bedrock far below the paws of the sphinx? * What lies behind the mysterious doors recently discovered at the end of a previously unexplored shaft inside the Great Pyramid? * Does mankind have a rendezvous with destiny - a rendezvous not in the future, but in the distant past - at a precise place and time? Using sophisticated computer simulations of the ancient skies to crack the millennial code that the monuments transcribe, Bauval and Hancock set out a startling new theory of the Pyramid Texts and other archaic Egyptian scriptures. ___________________________________________ 'Reads like a detective story, with the reader enthusiastically trying to outguess the writers' Literary Review 'Start the book in the early evening and continue uninterrupted till you complete it in the small house. The effect is wonderful . . . Your entire world view has been shifted a hundred yards . . . You fall asleep thinking that nothing will ever be the same again' Sunday Telegraph

Between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, Phoenician workshops produced green jasper scarabs which demonstrated both Greek and Persian influences. This volume presents a fully illustrated catalogue of examples drawn from across the area of Phoenician influence, including Spain, Sardinia, North Africa and theEastern Mediterranean. The scarabs, which are held in collections worldwide, are catalogued according to their cultural influences: Egyptian, Levantine, Hellenistic and miscellaneous. Within each of these four groups the scarabs are organised iconographically, with scenes including beetles, boats, birds, gods, fantastic creatures, warriors and kings, chariots, trees and animal attacks. John Boardman's introduction discusses the style, function and source material of the scarabs and the location of the workshops.

Subtitled The value and limitations of zooarchaeological analyses', this volume attempts to describe the effects of the adoption of domesticated species of cattle, sheep, goat and pig on social structure in three key areas of Egypt: the eastern and western deserts, the Delta and the Nile Valley. A descriptive (rather than explanatory) predictive model was created based on economic and social production noted in modern societies using the same species under similiar environmental conditions. This was then applied to the case study to determine why certain food production strategies were used in the formative period before the emergence of the first unified Egyptian state, what factors may have governed it, and what impact this had on Egyptian society.

Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum houses seventeen collections of Palaeolithic material from Egypt, comprising a total of 1009 objects. None of the objects were recovered during excavation but many were found by pioneers of prehistoric archaeology and notable anthropologists. The most significant and largest collection, which forms the focus of much of this study, is that of Charles Seligmann and dates from the first fourteen years of the 20th century. The first half of the book sets the background, examining the origins of Egyptian Palaeolithic archaeology, supported by extracts from diaries and contemporary publications, as well as discussing the types of stone artefacts collected, the cultures of the Egyptian Palaeolithic and more recent developments in research. The second half of the book presents catalogues of each collection with the artefacts illustrated at actual size. An appendix lists items from Seligman's collections which are now housed in other museums.

Kom el-Hisn is located near the western edge of the Nile delta, midway between Cairo and Alexandria, and about 13 km west of the Rosetta branch of the Nile. It is composed of primarily Old Kingdom deposits (Dynasties V and VI, ca. 2500-2290 BC) but the site was also occupied in the Middle and New Kingdom periods. (It has been suggested that some First Intermediate burials are included within the Old Kingdom architecture, and Kom el-Hisn clearly flourished during the height of Old Kingdom power.) After a detailed introduction, the author reviews the development of Egyptian settlement patterns and structures to provide the Old Kingdom context, before continuing to discuss the specific issues relating to the current research and some of the explanations offered by other researchers for the development of Egypt's particular brand of complex society. Chapter four describes the research programme that provided the data on which this study relies, and subsequent headings contain detailed descriptions of the deposits associated with each excavation unit in the analysis.Before the full summary in the ultimate chapter, there are statistical analyses that build the model of functional differentiation found within the excavated areas. The study as a whole places Kon el-Hisn within the larger context of the Egyptian state structure and allows some conclusions to be drawn as to how this important site functioned within this structure.

A narrative history of the cavalcade of archaeologists, charlatans, thieves, self-promoters, and sightseers who have flocked to the Nile Valley since early times to study - or steal - the wonders of ancient Egypt. The scandalous rape of Ancient Egypt is a historical vignette of greed, vanity, and dedicated archaeological research. It is a tale vividly told by renowned archaeology author, Brian Fagan, with characters that include the ancient historian Herodotus; Theban tomb robbers; obelisk-stealing Romans; Coptic Christians determined to erase the heretical past; mummy traders; leisured antiquarians; major European museums; Giovanni Belzoni, a circus strongman who removed more antiquities than Napoleon's armies; shrewd consuls and ruthless pashas; and archaeologists such Sir Flinders Petrie who changed the course of Egyptology. Fagan's classic account of the cavalcade of archaeologists, thieves, and sightseers who have flocked to the Nile Valley since ancient times. Featured in this edition are new accounts of stunning recent discoveries, including the Royal Tombs of Tanis, the Valley of Golden Mummies at Bahariya, the Tomb of the Sons of Ramses, and the sunken city of Alexandria (whose lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World). Fagan concludes with a clear-eyed assessment of the impact of modern mass tourism on archaeological sites and artifacts.

These nine papers are taken from a session at the EAA conference held in Esslington in 2001 which dealt with themes of interest to both the Egyptological community and to European archaeologists alike. The contributors deal with a range of subjects: recent Russian and Hellenic investigations in Egypt; the history of European Egyptology; political, cultural and economic contacts between Europe and Egypt in Dynastic, Hellenic-Roman and early Christian periods; links between ancient populations of Europe and Egypt drawing on anthropological data.

After the death of the last of the ramessides, Smendes, Lord of Tanis, proclaimed himself Pharaoh, founded the XXI dynasty and initiated one of the most unknown but attractive periods in the history of Egypt, the Third Intermediate Period. This book deals with the burials in the Valley of the Kings in the 21st - 30th Dynasties of Egypt, when they were not used by the rulers anymore. Through detailed investigation of the tombs and the hieroglyphes, the author has tried to identify the individuals buried in these tombs. The royal New Kingdom tombs were taken as a reference point and a comparison with the texts and iconography was established. This enables a better understandong of the traditions that followed in the Third Intermediate Period and naturally the changes that had taken place in the choice of the religious compendiums and representations associated with this period.

The Festivals of Opet, the Valley, and the New Year: Their socio-religious functions compares the religious and social functions of these three Festivals, the first two of which were often regarded by the Egyptians as a pair; the New Year Festival stands out on account of its corpus of surviving material and importance. Until now, detailed study of the New Year Festival has only been carried out with reference to the Greco-Roman period; this study turns its attention to the New Kingdom. The book analyses the broad perspectives that encompass Egyptian religion and cult practices which provided the context not only for worship and prayer, but also for the formation of social identity and responsibility. The festivals are examined in the whole together with their settings in the religious and urban landscapes. The best example is New Kingdom Thebes where large temples and burial sites survive intact today with processional routes connecting some of them. Also presented are the abundant written sources providing deep insight into those feasts celebrated for Amun-Re, the king of the gods. The volume also includes a list of dated records which provides a concordance for the Egyptian calendars.

Animal burials, whether buried with human remains or alone, are frequent discoveries in Egypt yet it can be difficult to reconstruct their religious and cultural significance. This study examines animals in human graves, possibly intended as food offerings, but the emphasis is on independent Predynastic animal burials because these provide greater archaeological evidence for animal cults and possible sacrifice. Flores examines the geographic distribution of the burials and the types of animal represented, including goats, dogs and, in more elite tombs, donkeys, birds, bulls and lions. Throughout, comparisons are made between cultures from Upper and Lower Egypt.