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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > Middle & Near Eastern archaeology
The Crown of Arsinoe II is a detailed study of a unique crown that was created for the Ptolemaic Egyptian Queen Arsinoe II which has important conclusions for ancient Egyptian history. Images of Arsinoe are represented in a broad spectrum of iconographic media, depicting this historical figure in a Greek as well as Egyptian cultural setting, and as queen and goddess alike, though her tomb has never been found. Based on detailed examination of reliefs, the aim is to identify and understand the symbolism that is embedded in each pictorial detail that together form the crown, as well as all contextual aspects of the relief scenes, and how this reflects the wearer's socio-political and religious positions. The results of this study suggest that the crown of Arsinoe was created for the living queen and reflected three main cultural positions: her royal position as King of Lower Egypt, her cultic role as high priestess, and her religious aspect as thea Philadelphos . It indicates that she was proclaimed female pharaoh during her lifetime and should be included in the official pharaonic king list as Ptolemy II's co-regent: her royal authority should be considered equivalent to Hatshepsut, Tawosret and Amenirdis II, as one of the most important royal women in Egyptian history. Arsinoe's complex persona were embedded in a very unique attribute her crown and that this remained a symbol of authority throughout the last centuries of the ancient Egyptian period.
Ancient Textiles Modern, Science II follows the success of the first proceedings, published in 2013, that catalogued the Forum's formative years. This proceedings highlights the range of subjects and approaches, from improved forms of notation for nalbinding and terminology for non-woven fabric structures, to presentation and practical interpretation of new and unique discoveries from Lengberg Castle and of Roman leather underpants. The significance of unrealised assumptions and unappreciated historic decisions is shown through the discovery of weaving tablets unrecognised during their excavation and the effects of water supply on the outcome of dyeing in Pompeii. Practical investigations of historic resist dyeing, methods to selectively colour early Byzantine embroidery after its completion, and how the choice of metal in dyeing kettles influences dyeing outcomes make up the rest of this volume. The European Textile Forum provides a place where ideas can be exchanged and aims to give a good practical foundation for further research. The end result is an understanding of each aspect of historic textiles that is greater than the sum of its individual parts., The Forum continues to explore textile artefacts, tools, methods of production, recording notation and the historic and contemporary meaning of textiles.
Most of this issue of BES is devoted to "Abbreviations in Egyptology," a comprehensive research tool that provides scholars with more than 5200 abbreviations used in Egyptological and Biblical literature. It is of particular use to those without ready access to the Lexikon der AEgyptologie. Also included are articles by Dieter Arnold discussing an exciting new discovery about the construction of Senwosret III's pyramid at Dahshur and John Gee about the use of the adverbial component in Egyptian sentences.
Delta Reports is a new series that will make available the substantial amount of archaeological work that has been undertaken in the Delta region of Egypt over recent decades. Volume I contains work done in and around the temple of Ba-neb-djed in the North-west temenos at Tel er-Rub'a (Mendes), material that was previously published in the ATP newsletter by the Akhenaten Temple Project (now discontinued).
In Ancient Egyptian Phonology. James Allen studies the sounds of the language spoken by the ancient Egyptians through application of the most recent methodological advances for phonological reconstruction. Using the internal evidence of the language, he proceeds from individual vowels and consonants to the sound of actual ancient Egyptian texts. Allen also explores variants, alternants, and the development of sound in texts, and touches on external evidence from Afroasiatic cognate languages. The most up to date work on this topic, Ancient Egyptian Phonology is an essential resource for Egyptologists and will also be of interest to scholars and linguists of African and Semitic languages.
Baqet III was the 'great overlord' of the Oryx province, located in the most fertile region of Egypt. The well-preserved wall scenes in his chapel record activities undertaken in the desert, on land and river, in workshops as well as those of wars and entertainments. Dated to the end of the Eleventh Dynasty, the tomb documents one of the critical times in Egyptian history. The architectural features and the scenes and inscriptions are published in colour photographs and detailed line drawings, accompanied by explanatory text.
Scholars and colleagues of Sarah Clackson honored her memory through a two-day symposium, "The Administration of Monastic Estates in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt," held at Christ Church, Oxford, 25-26 September 2004. This rich and varied volume presents the papers given at that symposium, plus four additional ones. The foreword presents a complete bibliography for Sarah Clackson and an essay examining her formative role in Coptic Studies up to the time of her premature death. The contributions consist of editions of previously unpublished ostraca and papyri, or of revised and expanded editions of previously published items (O.Clackson 1-34 and P.Clackson 35-50), and nine essays addressing socio-economic and religious issues that impacted the monastic communities of Egypt during Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic period. The volume concludes with the requisite indices: for the ostraca and papyri, indices nominum, rerum, et verborum, and a general index of topics for the commentaries on documents and the essays. Black-and-white images are provided for the ostraca and papyri.
This book explores the development of tombs as a cultural phenomenon in ancient Egypt and examines what tombs reveal about ancient Egyptian culture and Egyptians belief in the afterlife. * Investigates the roles of tombs in the development of funerary practices * Draws on a range of data, including architecture, artifacts and texts * Discusses tombs within the context of everyday life in Ancient Egypt * Stresses the importance of the tomb as an eternal expression of the self
For many people it is clear: the actions and beliefs of Ancient Israel are described in the Bible. The stories about its peoples and kings, struggles and wars, deities and shrines, are supposed to have been told and retold throughout the ages and recorded in ancient archives. At a certain moment in time these stories have been assembled in the Bible which becomes history. However, from the 19th century at least, scholars have doubted the historical reliability of many biblical stories, and archaeological research has hardly been able to confirm their historicity. The aim of this book is to describe the often-complicated relationship between archaeology and the Bible. It is not a book on `biblical archaeology', and archaeology is not used to illustrate the biblical stories, let alone to prove that the Bible is right. On the contrary, it focuses on the information that archaeology can provide of the lives and beliefs of the ancient peoples that inhabited the land in which the Bible was written, and on the question of how this information relates to the biblical stories. It aims at providing some examples of how this interplay of archaeology and biblical stories works, and how to interpret the discrepancy that may exist between the results of archaeological research and the biblical narrative. It thus offers an introduction into the field from the standpoint of an archaeologist. The book is intended for the general public, and will also be of interest to biblical scholars, historians and teachers, as well as archaeologists in other fields. It differs from the average non-scholarly book on this subject in that it is more personal, more eclectic, more archaeological. Reviews of the Dutch edition praise the passionate style and the way it focuses on the scientific process of researching problems, instead of on finding answers and presenting the solution.
Egyptologists, art historians, philologists, and anthropological archaeologists have long worked side by side in Egypt, but they often fail to understand one another's approaches. This book aims to introduce students to the archaeological side of the study of ancient Egypt and to bridge the gap between disciplines by explaining how archaeologists tackle a variety of problems. Douglas J. Brewer introduces the theoretical reasoning for each approach, as well as the methods and techniques applied to support it. This book is essential reading for any student considering further study of ancient Egypt.
This volume explores early complex society and nascent urbanism, based in studies of Mesopotamia during the fifth-fourth millennia bc. Urbanism in the Near East has traditionally been located in late fourthmillennium bc southern Mesopotamia (south Iraq); but recent excavations and surveys in northeast Syria and southeast Turkey have identified a distinctively northern Mesopotamian variant of this development, which can be dated to the early fourth millennium bc. The authors use multiscalar approaches, including material culturebased studies, settlement archaeology and regional surveys, to achieve an understanding of the dynamics of early urbanism across this key region. The book reveals the variety of social, economic and political relationships that are implicit within an urban centre and an urbanized society.
Dura-Europos is one of Syria's most important archaeological sites. Situated on the edge of the Euphrates river, it was the subject of extensive excavations in the 1920s and 30s by teams from Yale University and the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Controlled variously by Seleucid, Parthian, and Roman powers, the site was one of impressive religious and linguistic diversity: it was home to at least nineteen sanctuaries, amongst them a Synagogue and a Christian building, and many languages, including Greek, Latin, Persian, Palmyrene, and Hebrew which were excavated on inscriptions, parchments, and graffiti. Based on the author's work excavating at the site with the Mission Franco-Syrienne d'Europos-Doura and extensive archival research, this book provides an overview of the site and its history, and traces the story of its investigation from archaeological discovery to contemporary destruction.
The Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies(JCSCS) is published annually on behalf of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies by Lockwood Press. The Canadian Society for Coptic Studies is a Toronto-based nonprofit organization whose purpose is to bring together individuals interested in Coptic studies and to promote the dissemination of scholarly information on Coptic Studies through the organization of meetings and conferences and through the preparation of scholarly works for publication.
This volume is a study of the tombs of officials in the Theban necropolis, now lost, but documented in the manuscripts of travelers to Egypt in the early and mid 19th century. One such traveler was the accomplished draftsman Robert Hay, who made unpublished facsimile drawings which have been re-drawn by the author Lise Manniche for this book. The descriptions and drawings are used to reconstruct the decoration of tomb chapels in the Theban necropolis and to assess their ownership and place in history. The book also examines fragments of relevant wall decorations found in museums and other collections.
This fully-illustrated catalogue offers highlights of the Egyptian collection at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. A brief history of the collection is followed by a catalogue of seventy-seven objects, which date from the early third millennium BC to the eighth century AD. Many of these objects have not been previously published. The artefacts include statues, stelae, tools, games, clothing, coffins, figured ostraca, and papyri; each item is described, and its function and symbolism are discussed. Brief texts are translated. Appendices give museum registration numbers, provenance, and bibliographies.
This is the first volume in a four-book set covering all Egyptian pottery, ranging from the earliest (Fayum A) ceramics to pottery made in Egypt today, organized by historical periods. The manuals are quick identification guides as well as starting points for more extensive research. For each period, ceramic types are illustrated with a line drawing, accompanied by a description that includes information on the pot's material, manufacturing techniques, surface treatment, and shape. Color plates of representative ceramic types are included to give the clearest sense of the color, composition, and surface treatment. All four volumes provide an extensive list of suggested readings as well as a bibliography for each period. Introductory chapters in each book discuss the basics of pottery manufacture and analysis. This second edition boasts a new, expanded introduction. The first comprehensive guide to Egyptian pottery, this set will prove valuable to students as well as experienced field archaeologists. The volumes come in paperback and spiral-bound versions. The spiral bound versions, with hard laminated covers and tabs, are designed especially for the field and lab.
Discover and explore the most incredible statues, monuments, temples, bridges, and ancient cities with this unparalleled survey of the most famous buildings and structures created by humans. From Stonehenge to the Sagrada Familia, from the Great Wall of China to the Burj Khalifa, Manmade Wonders of the Worldplots a continent-by-continent journey around the world, exploring and charting the ingenuity and imagination used by different cultures to create iconic buildings. This truly global approach reveals how humans have tackled similar challenges - such as keeping the enemy out or venerating their gods - in vastly different parts of the world. As writer, historian, and broadcaster Dan Cruickshank writes in his foreword, "reading this book is like taking a journey through the world not only of the present but also of the past, because the roots of many wonders lie in antiquity." By combining breathtaking photography with 3D cutaway artworks, floorplans, and other illustrations, the hidden details and engineering innovations that make each building remarkable are revealed. Featuring the most visited monuments in the world - such as the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, and Machu Picchu - as well as some hidden gems, Manmade Wonders of the World can help you to map out the trip of a lifetime or simply be enjoyed as a celebration of the world that humans have built over thousands of years.
15 years later he had, in 'Upper Egypt: its Peoples and its Products', produced a comprehensive account of the manners, customs, superstitions and occupations of the people of the Nile Valley, desert region and Red Sea Coast. Written some 40 years after Edward William Lane's influential 'Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians', it is with the latter book that Dr. Georg Schweingurth, in his prefatory note, compares Klunzinger's achievement. Recalling how, on first meeting the author, he had urged him to develop the field of Egyptian culture and produce 'an appendix to the Baedeker of the future', he predicted that Klunzinger's book would become 'an indispensable addition to the library of every Nile tourist, however small it may be'. 120 years later, 'Upper Egypt: its People and its Products' retains both its interest and its power to delight, and will appeal to the expert and casual reader alike.
Who are we? Where do we come from? What formed us? Why are we as we are now? Today's world is amorphous and inexplicable without an idea of the past, including the most ancient, its prehistory. Mary Chubb's "City in the Sand", reprinted after 42 years, is about a dig (and several peripheral others) in Iraq in 1932, sandwiched between much shorter accounts of vigorous walking in Greece and Crete with other archaeological friends before and after it. Poignant thoughts arise of then and now in Iraq when she writes, "The country was at peace, and a good man was king". Westerners, welcomed and given concessions to dig in certain areas, could plan well ahead and find skilled local labour. As secretary to the Director of the dig, Hans Frankfort, a Dutchman she greatly admired, Mary Chubb was part of an international group funded by the University of Chicago as part of a vast plan of archaeological discovery in the Middle East, stretching forward into the late thirties. For what became a group not just of colleagues but of friends, it was a time of excitement and intellectual richness, shared and therefore doubled. The main task was the discovery with what seems miraculous skill and luck of Eshnunna, an ancient vassal city of Ur, and its complex uncovering - horizontal layers of building, thirty foot down, sorted into their periods, combed in minutest detail. It was heady work. Seals with which merchants marked their wares told, for instance, how goods had arrived there from India much earlier than anyone had thought; statues identified ancient gods; inscriptions, ancient rulers. Beautiful jewellery, beads, metalware, pottery, tools, artefacts of all sorts testified to the sophisticated civilization which had ruled there. It was dizzyingly exciting, the daily surprises, the sense of awe, and Miss Chubb, an amateur writing for the general reader, though she learn a great deal on the way, put across its fascination to the non-specialist with detailed explanations from the specialists on hand. Always it is what she calls "the human touch, a voice speaking down the ages" that appeals most to her: the thought of the man who held the seal "in his warm brown hand"; of the baby whose perfect footprint was pressed in plaster "hundreds of years before Abraham, away down in Ur, had gathered up his family and belongings ...to set out westwards for his new homeland"; of the thumb prints on ancient bricks; of the fearsome pear-shaped stones bored through the centre, exactly like those still used by the dig's basket boys as defensive weapons, now mounted on sticks; underground for thousands of years, these wooden handles had perished. As in her earlier book about her first dig, at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, "Nefertiti Lived Here", the emphasis in the telling is also on the human story today - that of the team working on the sites: archaeologists, architect, photographer, recorder of objects found, reader of inscriptions, and Gabriel, the indispensable odd-job man and driver who kept the show on the road. Miss Chubb is a natural stylist, her writing vigorous, fluent and graceful. Vivid images are slipped in with ease ("the muffled pulsing of the ship's heart"), and descriptions of landscape and weather, particularly in the lovely Greek and Cretan countryside, turn one's heart over now and then. This, of course, is what makes the book most memorable. The subject must fascinate all but the most incurious, and to bring it alive in modern terms there is a group of people in an atmosphere of comradeship, hard work, tough conditions and enormous fun. But it is the writing itself that really brings it alve: Miss Chubb has not just skill with language but a novelist's way with people. The personalities, the day-to-day life, reach us over 70 years as brightly as if they were (as she is) still with us. So her story is not just of historical interest but an imaginative re-telling of a human one, about young people, their adventures and achievements, the desert and its terrors; above all the past and its gifts to us in the present.
This book explores how Mycenaean builders perceived tomb construction, its costs and rewards.
Landlord villages dominated Iranian land tenure for hundreds of years, whereby one powerful landlord owned the village structures, surrounding farmland, and to all intents and purposes, the village occupants themselves, a system that in some cases remained in place up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In Oman, mud-brick oases were home to most of the rural population right up until Sultan Qaboos came to power in 1970, and required inhabitants of mud-brick houses to relocate into new concrete block buildings. Historical Archaeology and Heritage in the Middle East explores these everyday, rural communities in Iran and Oman in the 19th and 20th centuries, through a combination of building analysis, excavation, artefact analysis and ethnographic interviews. Drawing on the results of original field projects, the book considers new ways of exploring traditional lifeways, giving voice to hitherto largely ignored sections of the population, and offers new and different ways of thinking about how these people lived and what shaped their lives and the impact of major political and social changes on them. Place, memory and belonging are considered through the lens of material culture within these villages. The first of its kind, the book brings together methodologies, research questions, and themes that have never been used or addressed in the Middle East. Helping to establish historical archaeology in the Middle East and providing new ways in which the memorable, quotidian past can be exploited for its social and economic value in contemporary community and heritage developments, it is an ideal resource for students, scholars and practitioners of historical archaeology and heritage of and in the Middle East.
This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and 2010. The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's western desert, begun in 2001 under the aegis of Columbia University and sponsored by NYU since 2008, are investigating all aspects of social life and material culture at the administrative center of ancient Trimithis. The excavations so far have focused on three areas of this very large site: a centrally located upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period. This is the second volume of ostraka from the excavations Amheida (ancient Trimithis) in Egypt. It adds 491 items to the growing corpus of primary texts from the site. In addition to the catalog, the introductory sections make important contributions to understanding the role of textual practice in the life of a pre-modern small town. Issues addressed include tenancy, the administration of water, governance, the identification of individuals in the archaeological record, the management of estates, personal handwriting, and the uses of personal names. Additionally, the chapter "Ceramic Fabrics and Shapes" by Clementina Caputo breaks new ground in the treatment of these inscribed shards as both written text and physical object. This volume will be of interest to specialists in Roman-period Egypt as well as to scholars of literacy and writing in the ancient world and elsewhere. |
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