This 1836 work by Samuel Sharpe (1799-1881) is the first of two volumes on the history of ancient Egypt; the second, dealing with the Ptolemaic period, is also reissued in this series. From a banking family, Sharpe was fascinated by Thomas Young's and Champollion's work in deciphering the hieroglyphs. He taught himself Coptic, and compiled his own hieroglyphic vocabulary lists. His facility for decipherment was assisted by a natural gift for solving cryptograms, but his inferences sometimes led him into error. His objective in this book is 'to collect out of the writings of the ancients every particular relating to the History of Egypt', marshalling ancient authorities including the Old Testament, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and the Ptolemaic priest Manetho, whose division of the rulers into dynasties is still relied on. The second part of the book uses this evidence to discuss Egyptian life, language, beliefs and customs.

The career of Arthur Weigall (1880-1934) encompassed Egyptology but also stage design, film criticism and journalism. After studying in Germany, he worked at Abydos with Flinders Petrie, but in 1905 he was unexpectedly promoted to Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt, when Howard Carter was forced to resign. His work in Egypt, especially in the area of Luxor, focused on the conservation of monuments and the prevention of shipping of artefacts abroad, until 1911, when he returned to London. This 1907 book on the condition of the monuments between the First Cataract and the Sudanese frontier arose from his work as inspector, and is intended as 'a preliminary description of monuments and ancient remains which require to be thoroughly studied'. Unlike Weigall's travellers' guides to Egypt, this is a factual and technical work, drawing attention to the threats to monuments from neglect, plunder, and the Nile floods.

The traveller and archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows (1799-1860) made several trips through Asia Minor. This work is an account of the first of these, recording his careful observations of the lands he travelled through. On this trip, he found ancient cities which were unknown to Europeans at that time, including Xanthos, the capital of ancient Lycia, dating from the fifth century BCE. Fellows' narrative brings the journey to life with vivid descriptions of the people and places he encountered, and detailed sketches of notable antiquities and inscriptions. First published in 1839, this work generated significant interest, fuelling the British Museum's eagerness to acquire antiquities from the region. Fellows was later knighted for his role in these acquisitions, though controversy surrounds their removal. Two of his later works, An Account of Discoveries in Lycia (1841) and The Xanthian Marbles (1843), are also reissued in this series.

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200-850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

An army officer and politician, Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-53) also made his mark as an Egyptologist. This three-volume work, published in 1840-2, has remained an instructive resource in Egyptology up to the present day. Adopting the style of a journal, with illustrations and diagrams throughout, it narrates in detail his excavations at Giza, surveying and measuring the pyramids. Following Vyse's return to England, the work was continued by the engineer and surveyor John Shae Perring (1813-69). Vyse gives observations of his travels, and of the landscape, people and architecture he encountered, as well as details of the important work he carried out. Most notable was his discovery, using gunpowder, of four new chambers in the Great Pyramid containing 'quarry marks' - graffiti by the pyramid builders. Volume 1 (1840) covers the start of his travels in Egypt and the early excavations on the Great Pyramid.

An army officer and politician, Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-53) also made his mark as an Egyptologist. This three-volume work, published in 1840-2, has remained an instructive resource in Egyptology up to the present day. Adopting the style of a journal, with illustrations and diagrams throughout, it narrates in detail his excavations at Giza, surveying and measuring the pyramids. Following Vyse's return to England, the work was continued by the engineer and surveyor John Shae Perring (1813-69). Vyse gives observations of his travels, and of the landscape, people and architecture he encountered, as well as details of the important work he carried out. Most notable was his discovery, using gunpowder, of four new chambers in the Great Pyramid containing 'quarry marks' - graffiti by the pyramid builders. Volume 3 (1842) describes the work continued by Perring on various pyramids, and on the mummy pits at Saqqara.

Oimenepthah I, better known to us as Seti I, was regarded as a great pharaoh by his contemporaries, although his son Ramesses II would claim greater renown. Seti's tomb was discovered by Belzoni in 1817 and was the first to be found to have extensive decorations throughout. The huge alabaster coffin found in the tomb was sold to Sir John Soane, who held a three-day party upon its arrival at his London house, where it can still be seen. Written by the noted Egyptologist Samuel Sharpe (1799-1881), this illustrated description of the intricately decorated sarcophagus was published in 1864. By the time of his death, Sharpe was regarded in Britain as one of the most important figures in helping to popularise all things Egyptian. With the artist and sculptor Joseph Bonomi (1796-1878), who provided the drawings here, he collaborated in organising the Egyptian court at the Crystal Palace in 1854.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfectionssuch as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed worksworldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Essay On Dr. Young's And M. Champollion's Phonetic System Of Hieroglyphics: With Some Additional Discoveries, By Which It May Be Applied To Decipher The Names Of The Ancient Kings Of Egypt And Ethiopia Henry Salt Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825 History; Ancient; Egypt; Champollion, J.F., 1790-1832; Egyptian language; Egyptian language Writing, Hieroglyphic; History / Ancient / Egypt

An army officer and politician, Richard William Howard Vyse (1784-53) also made his mark as an Egyptologist. This three-volume work, published in 1840-2, has remained an instructive resource in Egyptology up to the present day. Adopting the style of a journal, with illustrations and diagrams throughout, it narrates in detail his excavations at Giza, surveying and measuring the pyramids. Following Vyse's return to England, the work was continued by the engineer and surveyor John Shae Perring (1813-69). Vyse gives observations of his travels, and of the landscape, people and architecture he encountered, as well as details of the important work he carried out. Most notable was his discovery, using gunpowder, of four new chambers in the Great Pyramid containing 'quarry marks' - graffiti by the pyramid builders. Volume 2 (1840) contains detailed descriptions of the excavation of several pyramids and their contents, and appendices with extensive measurements.

His independent means as the son of a wealthy banker enabled Alexander Henry Rhind (1833 63) to devote his short life to antiquarianism. While reading for the Scottish bar, he studied and investigated Pictish remains, and pressed for the inclusion of archaeological sites in Ordnance Survey maps. On developing tubercular symptoms, he gave up his legal studies and passed the winters from 1855 to 1857 in Egypt, where he made the important studies and excavations recorded in this 1862 book. He focuses on the necropolis of Thebes, and in particular on the unplundered tomb of an eighteenth-dynasty official. Putting his work into the wider context of the history of ancient Egypt and the importance of the city of Thebes, he also describes the reuse of the necropolis ruins as homes for modern Egyptian peasants and as the centre of a thriving trade in antiquities, both genuine and forged."

In 1820, the English traveller Sir Frederick Henniker (1793-1825) set out for Egypt, which he would explore for nearly three years. He sailed up the Nile, calling it 'the least romantic, but most useful of rivers', stopping off at many places along the way. His adventures were varied: he was the first known person to climb to the apex of the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza, and he acquired a second-century coffin that is now in the British Museum. He claimed to have met Egypt's khedive, Muhammad Ali Pasha, with whom he discussed English horses and military campaigns. Heading next to Mount Sinai and Jerusalem, he was brutally attacked by bandits on the road to Jericho, leaving him injured and naked. He recovered and continued his journey through the Middle East and back to England, where he published this lively and often amusing account of his adventures in 1823.

The publisher and author John Taylor (1781 1864), who took an interest in various antiquarian matters, published this work in 1859. Using the measurements taken by the seventeenth-century archaeologist John Greaves and by the French savants who had examined the Great Pyramid at Giza during Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, he deduced the existence of a 'pyramid inch' (fractionally longer than the British inch), which was one twenty-fifth of the so-called 'sacred cubit' and was derived from ancient astronomical and time-measurement observations; and as a convinced Christian, he concluded that the British inch was therefore divinely inspired. His work was very influential and had a considerable following (the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth's 1864 book on Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid is also reissued in this series), but was later debunked by the more accurate surveys and measurements of Flinders Petrie, whose interest in Egypt was partly aroused by reading this book."

Margaret Benson (1865 1916), the fourth of six children of the archbishop of Canterbury E. W. Benson, was a brilliant scholar at Oxford who found an escape from the conventional life of housekeeping for her father when she travelled to Egypt for her health in 1895. She obtained permission to excavate a site, of which she candidly admits that the authorities had no expectations (or they would not have entrusted it to such inexperienced amateurs). She and her close friend Janet Gourlay (1863 1912), who had briefly studied archaeology under Flinders Petrie, published this account of their discoveries at the temple of Mut at Karnak in 1899. It contains an overview of the site and its context in Egyptian history, with an account of the three seasons of excavation and a section on Egyptian religion. The highly illustrated book concludes with translations of the many inscriptions found in the temple remains."

First published in 1930, this book collects all of the ancient Egyptian objects dating from before the Twenty Seventh Dynasty that were known to have been found at Greek archaeological sites prior to original publication. The book groups the items by find site, and photographs of many of the objects are included at the end of the text. The result is an interesting look at the material presence of ancient Egypt in the Aegean in the formative years of Greek civilization, without drawing any firm conclusions from the evidence provided.

Collected Studies CS1070 The present book collects 31 articles that Jacques van der Vliet, a leading scholar in the field of Coptic Studies (Leiden University / Radboud University, Nijmegen), has published since 1999 on Christian inscriptions from Egypt and Nubia. These inscriptions are dated between the third/fourth and the fourteenth centuries, and are often written in Coptic and/or Greek, once in Latin, and sometimes (partly) in Arabic, Syriac or Old Nubian. They include inscriptions on tomb stones, walls of religious buildings, tools, vessels, furniture, amulets and even texts on luxury garments. Whereas earlier scholars in the field of Coptic Studies often focused on either Coptic or Greek, Van der Vliet argues that inscriptions in different languages that appear in the same space or on the same kind of objects should be examined together. In addition, he aims to combine the information from documentary texts, archaeological remains and inscriptions, in order to reconstruct the economic, social and religious life of monastic or civil communities. He practiced this methodology in his studies on the Fayum, Wadi al-Natrun, Sohag, Western Thebes and the region of Aswan and Northern Nubia, which are all included in this book.

Originally named Demetrio Papandriopulo and of Greek parentage, Giovanni D'Athanasi (1798 1854) became in 1815 the servant of Henry Salt (1780 1827), the traveller and antiquary who became British Consul in Egypt and a pioneer Egyptologist. (An account by J. J. Halls of Salt's life and career is also reissued in this series.) Between 1817 and 1827, D'Athanasi excavated on Salt's behalf at Thebes. Published in 1836, this book was intended to accompany the sale of the collection of antiquities amassed by Salt, in which D'Athanasi had a financial interest, but various delays meant that it came out after the main sale had taken place. As well as an often diverting account (in which many axes are ground) of Salt's activities at Giza, Thebes, Memphis and Abu Simbel, the book contains a complete catalogue of the collection, indicating which items were later acquired by the British Museum."

Originally published in 1935, this book presents the content of the Frazer Lecture for that year, which was delivered by Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner at Cambridge University. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Egyptology, ancient history and archaeology.

In its significance for both Islam and Christianity, and ultimately the wider world, the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 was to herald the dawn of the early modern period and bring universal recognition to the man forever known as Mehmet the Conqueror, or Sultan Mehmet II (1432-1481); who at the age of twenty-one had brought the millennium-old Byzantine empire to an end. The very improbability of such an accomplishment, after many failed attempts on Constantinople by different factions over the centuries, was to only add to Mehmet’s growing status; while his quest for territorial acquisition over the following twenty-five years, in the establishment of an Ottoman empire, was to place this dynastic family on the international stage, where they would remain a significant political force over the following five centuries. Little material evidence has survived from the formative period of Mehmet's life, and certainly nothing of any direct significance such as a portrait. However, Mehmet had an enduring interest in that genre, though it was naturally assumed that after an absence of more than five centuries a portrait of the young sultan in any form had simply not survived the intervening period. The appearance of a circular portrait relief of the sultan was thus to be of more than passing interest, given the youthfulness of the turbaned Muslim sitter, who was immediately identifiable as Mehmet the Conqueror from both his modelled bronze relief profile and the titles encircling his portrait, addressing its subject in Latin as the 'Great Prince and Great Emir, Sultan Master Mehmet' - Magnus Princeps et Magnus Amiras Sultanus DNS [= Dominus] Mehomet. The willingness of Mehmet to commit his imperial vision to the hands of a western artist at such an early period of his life is at the heart of this extraordinary episode, which embraces the looming extinction of the millennium-old empire of Byzantium, an expanding Ottoman political enterprise and the fall of Constantinople itself. It represents a fusion between east and west that is without parallel in the mid-fifteenth century. Indeed, so directly can the commission of the bronze relief be linked with Mehmet that beyond the revelation of his youthful, and enigmatic, portrait is the remarkable sense of an event of historic proportions, now viewable through the eyes of the protagonist himself.

2012 American Publishers (PROSE) Awards winner for Best Archaeology & Anthropology Book
For most of the modern world, ancient Nubia seems an unknown and enigmatic land. Only a handful of archaeologists have studied its history or unearthed the Nubian cities, temples, and cemeteries that once dotted the landscape of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nubia's remote setting in the midst of an inhospitable desert, with access by river blocked by impassable rapids, has lent it not only an air of mystery, but also isolated it from exploration. Over the past century, particularly during this last generation, scholars have begun to focus more attention on the fascinating cultures of ancient Nubia, ironically prompted by the construction of large dams that have flooded vast tracts of the ancient land.
This book attempts to document some of what has recently been discovered about ancient Nubia, with its remarkable history, architecture, and culture, and thereby to give us a picture of this rich, but unfamiliar, African legacy.

Originally published between 1913 and 1914 for the Egypt Exploration Fund, these three excavation reports relating to the necropolis at Abydos are now reissued together in one volume. Following the important work carried out by Flinders Petrie - his two reports on The Royal Tombs (1900-1) and the three-part Abydos (1902-4) are also reissued in this series - Edouard Naville (1844-1926) began further excavation and recording of the site's cemeteries with Thomas Eric Peet (1882-1934) and others. Each report contains a section of valuable illustrative material, such as photographs and drawings of the discovered artefacts. Part 1, covering the 1909-10 season, includes chapters on pottery and mummified dogs. Part 2, written up by Peet, covers all the tomb work carried out between 1909 and 1912. Part 3, co-authored with W. L. S. Loat, covers the 1912-13 season, notably the discovery of an ibis cemetery.

In this book, Anne Porter explores the idea that mobile and sedentary members of the ancient world were integral parts of the same social and political groups in greater Mesopotamia during the period 4000 to 1500 BCE. She draws on a wide range of archaeological and cuneiform sources to show how networks of social structure, political and religious ideology, and everyday as well as ritual practice, worked to maintain the integrity of those groups when the pursuit of different subsistence activities dispersed them over space. These networks were dynamic, shaping many of the key events and innovations of the time, including the Uruk expansion and the introduction of writing, so-called secondary state formation and the organization and operation of government, the literary production of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the first stories of Gilgamesh, and the emergence of the Amorrites in the second millennium BCE.

A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. His meticulous recording of artefacts and his sequence dating of pottery types found in Egypt and Palestine made Near Eastern archaeology a more rigorous and scientific discipline. This fully illustrated follow-up report of 1901 on the royal tombs at Abydos, capital of Upper Egypt, covers the early dynastic period (c.3100-c.2700 BCE). Petrie gives detailed descriptions of eight tombs and the associated finds. A chapter on the inscriptions is provided by Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862-1934). Petrie wrote prolifically throughout his long career for both specialists and non-specialists. His preliminary report, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty (1900), and the three-part Abydos (1902-4) are among those works also reissued in this series.

A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. The diversity of his work is revealed in these three excavation reports, reissued here together but originally published separately in 1911, 1913 and 1914. The first, an important resource on mummy portraits, records significant discoveries made during renewed work on the Roman necropolis at Hawara. Continued excavations at Memphis are also described. Petrie's work at Tarkhan, where he excavated numerous tombs, is written up in the second and third reports. Each report features a valuable section of illustrations, including photographs and drawings of the various sites and finds, most notably the lifelike mummy portraits. Petrie wrote prolifically throughout his long career, and a great many of his other publications - including earlier reports from both Hawara and Memphis - are also reissued in this series.

A pioneering Egyptologist, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) excavated over fifty sites and trained a generation of archaeologists. He also played a notable part in the preservation of a number of cuneiform tablets that became known collectively as the Tell el-Amarna letters. Petrie's Syria and Egypt (1898), containing summaries, is also reissued in this series, along with many of his other publications. The present work, first published in 1894 and richly illustrated, gives an account of the work that Petrie carried out in 1891-2. It contains detailed information about both the technical aspects of the dig and the array of artefacts found, including the tablet fragments of diplomatic correspondence from the fourteenth century BCE. The chapter on the tablets is provided by Archibald Sayce, Francis Llewellyn Griffth discusses ceramic inscriptions, and the flint tools are examined by F. C. J. Spurrell.

Originally published in 1947, this book presents the content of Stephen Glanville's inaugural lecture upon taking up the position of Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge University. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Egyptology, ancient history and archaeology.