The volume provides a detailed catalogue of 127 stelae (many funerary) deriving from the Nile Valley, now part of the Egyptian collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The stelae are written in various scripts – Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic, Carian, Greek, Coptic and early Arabic – and cover a date-range of over 4000 years. Few museums have published their complete holdings of such material, and the carefully described and translated information from these stelae throws a flood of light on the history, religion, funerary customs, art and iconography, daily life and administrative systems of ancient Egypt and Nubia. Each entry has a photograph of the stela as well as a meticulous line-drawing which enables the texts and iconography to be understood and interpreted. Full museological details such as material, precise measurements, provenance (where known), mode of acquisition and dating are provided. The volume will interest specialists as well as a wider public concerned with Egyptology.

Takhyil is a term from Arabic poetics denoting the evocation of images. It has a broad spectrum of connotations throughout classical philosophical poetics and rhetoric, and it is closely linked to the Greek concept of phantasia. This volume is comprised of annotated translations of key texts on this topic from major philosophers and literary theoreticians, including Alfarabi (al-Farabi), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and 'Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani. In her preface, the classicist Anne Sheppard relates takhyil to Greek poetics, and in his introduction, Wolfhart Heinrichs traces the development of the term in the Arabic tradition. The second part of the book contains eight studies on takhyil and various aspects of image-evocation and how it relates to musical theory, literary criticism and rhetoric. The opening essay is by Katrin Kohl, a specialist in European poetics, who places takhyil in the wider context of poetic universals.