The author lays out the early Ptolemaic tax system, describes the changes in the capitation taxes during the reign of Ptolemy II, discusses the other state and temple revenues, and then reconstructs the prosopography and provenance of thirty-nine tax payers whose names occur frequently in these initial studies. Having then set the stage, the author provides editions of sixty-one ostraca from Harold Nelson's collection that include an important group of early Ptolemaic Demotic, Greek, and bilingual ostraca, mostly tax receipts. One late Ptolemaic account ostracon (Cat. no. 3) is also published here since it concerns the business of choachytes, who figure prominently in the group of early Ptolemaic ostraca. The book concludes with full indices, and each of the ostraca is illustrated in drawing and photograph.

Medinet Habu in western Thebes (modern Luxor) is among the most important sites in Egypt. It is dominated by the great mortuary temples of King Ramesses III (ca. 1182 b.c.), and Kings Aye and Horemheb (ca. 1324-1293 B.C.). It served as the seat of the regional government in the Late New Kingdom (ca. 1140 b.c.), and an important Coptic Christian community grew up within its great fortification walls. For nearly 1,500 years Medinet Habu played a central role in Egyptian religion, life, and politics. In 1924, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago began the documentation of Medinet Habu. The Epigraphic Survey still works on the complete photographic and facsimile publication of the reliefs and inscriptions that appear on the temple walls. From 1926 to 1933, the Architectural Survey led by Uvo Holscher studied and later published the architectural features of the complex. The last facet of the documentation -- the publication of thousands of objects excavated at the site -- was interrupted by World War II. This book, the first of a projected multiple volume series, marks the resurrection of the project to publish the small finds. This volume presents 349 scarabs, scaraboids (including lentoids, cowroids, and buttons), heart scarabs and their Sons of Horus amulets, heart amulets, seals, and seal impressions on bullae, vessel stoppers, amphora handles, mudbricks, and funerary cones that date from approximately 1470 b.c. to the eighth century a.d. Each object is described and illustrated, and whenever possible, placed in its original archaeological context. The scarabs and scaraboids from Medinet Habu comprise one of the largest groups of such material excavated from any site inEgypt.

Deir el-Medina, the village of the workmen who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, has bequeathed to us thousands of private records. A. G. McDowell presents translations of 200 of these, giving a unique and fascinating insight into the secret lives of Ancient Egyptian people.

An indispensable companion to any of the other volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt, the Supplementary Bibliographies and Indices facilitates direct access to specific information on the people, places, and inscriptions catalogued by James Henry Breasted. Exhaustively compiled and intelligently arranged, these indices include the kings and queens, temples and geographical locations, divine names, and titles and ranks encompassed by three thousand years of Egyptian history. Also provided are indices of all Egyptian, Hebrew, and Arabic terms mentioned in the texts, as well as a complete listing of the records with their location in Lepsius's Denkmaler. This first paperback edition of Ancient Records of Egypt features the important addition of bibliographies by Peter A. Piccione, together with an introduction that puts Breasted's historical commentaries into modern perspective. These bibliographies offer valuable guidance on new translations and modern treatments of the inscriptions included in Ancient Records of Egypt. Professor Piccione points the reader toward recent studies of Egyptian chronology and modern scholarship on Egyptian and Nubian history. He also provides information on anthologies of Egyptian texts in translation and topographical bibliographies that suggest further reading on specific ancient Egyptian monuments, texts, and reliefs.

With volume 4 of Ancient Records of Egypt, James Henry Breasted brings us to the end of the self-governed era of ancient Egyptian civilization. Chief among the documents contained in this volume are the inscriptions from the Medinet Habu Temple, one of the most completely preserved temples of Egypt, and the great Papyrus Harris, the largest (133 feet long) and most sumptuous papyrus extant, 95 percent of which Breasted was the first to study closely. Together these documents present a detailed record of the reign and benefactions of Ramesses III, whose reign lasted more than thirty years. Volume 4 includes intriguing records of the harem conspiracy and legal documents that indicate the extent of robberies of royal tombs. Records of the Nile levels at Karnak provide important chronological landmarks, while the Stela of Piye (Piankhi), which documents the Nubian kingdom already in existence as a full-fledged power, provides information on the internal political climate of Egypt during a time when no aggressive monarch controlled the whole country. Breasted also notes where these ancient Egyptian records intersect with accounts of the same events from other sources, such as the mutiny of Psamtik I's troops as inscribed on the alabaster statue of Nesuhor and as narrated by Herodotus. In effect, Ancient Records of Egypt offers a valuable dual record. On the one hand, Breasted presents the events and personages of ancient Egypt as recorded in the documents. On the other hand, he presents a history of the documents themselves. Fragmentary or partially destroyed, carved on temple and tomb walls or written on fragile scrolls of leather or papyrus, even inscribed on the coffins and temple linens of the royal and priestly mummy wrappings, these records offer an irreplaceable primary source on a fascinating civilization.

This volume, the second to publish the results of Seele's two seasons of excavations in Nubia, presents Neolithic, A-Group, and Post-A-Group remains from Qustul, Ballana, and Adindan. Neolithic remains were only found in a cave behind the village of Adindan and consist of sherds, some implements, a human skull, and fragments of decorated ostrich eggshell. The cave is comparable to caves found deep in Sudan and represents a northern extension of the cultures well known in the area of the second cataract. Also included in this volume are A-Group remains from cemeteries other than Cemetery L and Post-A-Group remains from two burials, dated between the end of A-Group and the beginning of C-Group, that can be compared with others in the region to identify a limited occupation in a period where none has been thought to exist in recent years.

The Roman emperor Augustus gave his name to the age he dominated, from the latter half of the first century BC until the second decade of the following century. Yet he shared the age with several royal women who ruled parts of the Mediterranean world, in a symbiotic relationship with Rome. This book is the first detailed portrait of these remarkable women. Previous accounts of the period have centered on Augustus or Rome's allied kings, with scant attention to the women who ruled as their partners or on their own. The most famous of these is Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of the great Cleopatra VII of Egypt and her partner, the Roman magistrate Marcus Antonius. Her very survival following Roman victory over her mother's forces is itself noteworthy but she went on to rule Mauretania (northwest Africa) with her husband for more than twenty years. She even attempted to reconstitute her mother's legacy in this remote region and, like her mother, was an ardent patron of the arts and scholarship. Other women of note included in this book are Pythodoris of Pontos, who ruled northern Asia Minor for forty years, and Salome of Judaea, the sister of Herod the Great, who, while never queen, exercised significant power for nearly half a century. These and others - Glaphyra of Cappadocia, Dynamis of Bosporos, Abe of Olbe, and Mousa of Parthia - were all part of the interrelated dynasties of the Augustan Age. Their values and attitudes toward rule directly affected the emergent Roman imperial system, and their legacy survived for centuries through their descendants and the goals of the royal women of Rome, such as Livia and Octavia, the wife and sister of Augustus. Assimilating all of the historical and archaeological evidence, Cleopatra's Daughter recovers these extraordinary women from the dim shadows of the ancient past.

This work addresses the question of the Egyptian Hegemony during the 13th century BCE: its nature and its cultural processes, and the analysis of the Egyptian-style pottery in three Canaanite City-States is used to provide the proofs of the Egyptian presence there. The author has chosen the archaeological sites of Hazor, Megiddo and Lachish for a case study. Situated in three different regions of Southern Canaan, these three cities are known to be powerful and rich during the 13th century BCE. The Egyptian pottery of these sites has been identified and classified in a typology with numerous parallels to the Egyptian contemporaneous sites. A fabric analysis has been made from description of a fresh break section taken from each sample studied and, in a few cases completed by a petrographic analysis. All the data are gathered in an electronic database and can be consulted for further studies about this corpus. From the interpretation of the corpus, the author presents a spatial analysis of the Egyptian-Style pottery for each identified building in each site in order to shed light on an Egyptian presence at these cities and to qualify this presence.

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 empowerment of the body to achieve this goal. Seen from this perspective, the Coffin Texts provide a rich material for studying ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body by providing insights into the underlying structure of the body as a whole and the proper function of individual part of the body as seen by the ancient Egyptians. Drawing on a theoretical framework from cognitive linguistics and phenomenological anthropology, Breathing Flesh presents an analysis of the conceptualisation of the human body and its individual parts in the ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts. From this starting point, more overarching concepts and cultural models are discussed, including the ritual conceptualisation of the acquisition and use of powerful substances such as "magic", and the role of fertility and procreation in ancient Egyptian mortuary conceptions.

These volumes of studies in honour of Manfred Bietak include contributions from a wide variety of research areas. Articles deal with pre- and proto-dynastic periods in Ancient Egypt as well as with aspects of dynastic to modern times. Others focus on the interaction between Egypt, the Levant, Cyprus, the Aegean and Phoenicia, whereas in another section Minoan, Mycenaean and Cypriote aspects are covered. Scholars from Near Eastern studies contributed as well as researchers working with Nubian and Meroitic material. Further articles cover issues from Graeco-Roman Egypt to Classical studies and Art History. Articles in a further section deal with Sciences and Chronology, reflecting Manfred Bietak's interest in these subjects as well.

This volume, published in memory of Barbara Adams, presents 57 contributions by authors from 16 different countries and contains the results of the latest research on Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt. In addition to papers originally presented at the 2002 conference in Krakow, there are the invited contributions by the friends and colleagues of Barbara Adams, including several on new discoveries from and thoughts about the site of Hierakonpolis.

Ce volume de 779 p. dont 111 planches photographiques en couleur, illustre de 497 figures au trait donnees dans le texte ou dans l'un des 25 depliants de releves reunis, avec 3 plans, dans un coffret annexe, presente les resultats de sept campagnes de fouilles menees de 1981 a 1990 sur 10 ermitages de cette agglomeration monastique des Kellia. L'architecture, l'epigraphie copte, l'iconographie et la ceramologie fournissent pour chacun d'eux une abondante moisson de donnees nouvelles. Dans un important chapitre de synthese intitule Kirche und Diakonia: Gemeinschaftsraume in den Eremitagen der Qusur el-'Izeila, G. Descoeudres etudie les dispositifs architecturaux et les pratiques religieuses que revelent les salles communautaires, tantot agapeia, tantot eglises, qui marquent l'evolution de la vie monastique d'un ascetisme eremitique vers une pratique plus communautaire et plus ouverte aux pelerins (Peeters 2001)

The small town of Pathyris, modern Gebelein, is located south of Thebes. After a huge revolt suppressed in 186 B.C., a Ptolemaic military camp was built in this town, where local people could serve as soldiers-serving-for-pay. The Government took several initiatives to Hellenize the town, resulting in a bilingual society. The town produced hundreds of papyri and ostraka, discovered during legal excavations and illegal diggings at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century. Katelijn Vandorpe and Sofie Waebens describe the history of the town and reconstruct the bilingual archives by using, among other things, prosopographical data and the method of museum archaeology.

Issue 61 contains articles on various aspects of Ancient Egypt: spirituality and sexuality, varying characteristics in Egyptian art, and Egypt's attitude to its neighbours. There is also an important article - significantly by an Egyptian scholar - on a late Egyptian verbal construction, still used in Egyptian colloquial Arabic today. Also contains many reviews. Oxbow Books 2005)

An assemblage of stone vessels and stone statues belongs to the extensive archaeological material brought to light during the excavations conducted by the Czech Institute of Egyptology in the mortuary complex of king Neferre (5th Dynasty) at Abusir. Neferres' assemblage represents a unique archaeological complex where the artefacts are complemented with their recorded archaeological context (structure, site, etc). The monograph includes not only the analysis of the stone vessels assemblage by its material characteristics, but also a separate chapter on certain aspects of the stone statues found in Neferre's mortuary complex.

by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild The Eastern Sahara is a fascinating place to study structures. These larger, more complex sites are almost prehistory. Confronted with the stark reality of a hyper always in the lower parts of large basins, most of which arid environment that receives no measurable rainfall, were formed by deflation during the Late Pleistocene lacks vegetation, and is seemingly without life, it would hyper-arid interval between about 65,000 and 13,000 seem to be an unlikely place to find a rich and complex years ago. Their location near the floor of these basins mosaic of archaeological remains documenting past was influenced primarily by one factor - water. During human presence. Despite this impression of a hostile wet phases, runoff from extensive catchment areas environment, there is widespread and abundant caused the development of large, deep, seasonal lakes, archaeological evidence. or playas, in the lowermost parts of these basins. This It is obvious that this area was not always a lifeless surface water would last for several weeks or months desert. Faunal and plant remains found in the excavations after the seasonal rains, and by digging wells after the at Holocene-age settlements, dating between 9500 and playa became dry, water could still be obtained during 5000 radiocarbon years ago, indicate that rainfall during most, if not all, of the dry season.