Download or read book Religion and Cultural Memory written by Jan Assmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ten brilliant essays, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory. Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a cultural dimension too. He develops a persuasive view of the life of the past in such surface phenomena as codes, religious rites and festivals, and canonical texts on the one hand, and in the Freudian psychodrama of repressing and resurrecting the past on the other. Whereas the current fad for oral history inevitably focuses on the actual memories of the last century or so, Assmann presents a commanding view of culture extending over five thousand years. He focuses on cultural memory from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Osage Indians down to recent controversies about memorializing the Holocaust in Germany and the role of memory in the current disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Download or read book Gods and Men in Egypt written by Françoise Dunand and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their wide-ranging interpretation of the religion of ancient Egypt, Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche explore how, over a period of roughly 3500 years, the Egyptians conceptualized their relations with the gods. Drawing on the insights of anthropology, the authors discuss such topics as the identities, images, and functions of the gods; rituals and liturgies; personal forms of piety expressing humanity's need to establish a direct relation with the divine; and the afterlife, a central feature of Egyptian religion. That religion, the authors assert, was characterized by the remarkable continuity of its ritual practices and the ideas of which they were an expression.Throughout, Dunand and Zivie-Coche take advantage of the most recent archaeological discoveries and scholarship. Gods and Men in Egypt is unique in its coverage of Egyptian religious expression in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Written with nonspecialist readers in mind, it is largely concerned with the continuation of Egypt's traditional religion in these periods, but it also includes fascinating accounts of Judaism in Egypt and the appearance and spread of Christianity there.

Download or read book Ancient Egyptian Literature written by Antonio Loprieno and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with the development and the characteristics of the literature of Ancient Egypt over a period of more than two millennia, from the monumental origins of autobiography at the end of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2150 BCE) down to the latest literary compositions in Demotic during the Graeco-Roman period (300 BCE-200 CE). This book, the result of an international co-operation among more than twenty scholars, is divided into sections devoted to the definition of literary discourse in Ancient Egypt; the history and genres of these texts, their linguistic and stylistic features; and the image of Ancient Egypt as displayed in later literary traditions of the Mediterranean world - Greek, Coptic, Arabic. With over thirty chapters, this volume provides an interdisciplinary account of current research in one of the methodologically most advanced fields of Egyptology.

Download or read book Ancient Egyptian Kingship written by O'Connor and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-06-26 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This well-illustrated volume represents an extensive analysis of kingship in ancient Egypt. Each of the six contributing authors investigates particular areas of his own expertise. Among the topics covered are the origin of kingship, its distinctive traits and its general nature, and its reflection in royal art and architecture.

Download or read book Priests Tongues and Rites written by Jacco Dieleman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an investigation into the sphere of production and use of two related bilingual magical handbooks found as part of a larger collection of magical and alchemical manuscripts around 1828 in the hills surrounding Luxor, Egypt. Both handbooks, dating to the Roman period, contain an assortment of recipes for magical rites in the Demotic and Greek language. The library which comprises these two handbooks is nowadays better known as the Theban Magical Library. The book traces the social and cultural milieu of the composers, compilers and users of the extant spells through a combination of philology, sociolinguistics and cultural analysis. To anybody working on Greco-Roman Egypt, ancient magic, and bilingualism this study is of significant importance.

Download or read book Religion Index Two written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cultural Expression in the Old Kingdom Elite Tomb written by Sasha Verma and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Expression in the Old Kingdom Elite Tomb considers the material and immaterial culture left behind by the ancient Egyptian elite in their tombs starting some 5000 years ago. The book intends to understand this culture reflecting the intention of the ancient Egyptians. All these intentions are now inaccessible to us, a paradox indeed.

Download or read book The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt written by William Stevenson Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of Egyptian art and architecture is enhanced by revised text, an updated bibliography, and over four hundred illustrations.

Download or read book Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt written by Uroš Matić and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt shifts the focus of gender studies in Egyptology to social phenomena rarely addressed through the lens of gender – war and violence, exploring the complex intersections of violence and gender in ancient Egypt. Building on current discussions in philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and on analysis of relevant historic texts, iconography, and archaeological remains by looking at possible gender patterns behind evidence of trauma, the book bridges the gap between modern understandings of gendered violence and its functioning in ancient Egypt. Areas explored include the following: differences in gendered aggression and violent acts between people and deities; sexual violence; the taking of men, women, and children as prisoners of war; and feminization of enemies. By examining ancient Egyptian texts and images with evidence for violence from different periods and contexts – private tombs, divine temples, royal stelae, papyri, and ostraca, ranging over 3,000 years of cultural history – Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt highlights the complex intersection between gender and violence in ancient Egyptian culture. The book will appeal to scholars and students working in Egyptology, archaeology, history, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies.

Download or read book Times of Transition written by Sylvie Honigman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multidisciplinary study takes a fresh look at Judean history and biblical literature in the late fourth and third centuries BCE. In a major reappraisal of this era, the contributions to this volume depict it as one in which critical changes took place. Until recently, the period from Alexander’s conquest in 332 BCE to the early years of Seleucid domination following Antiochus III’s conquest in 198 BCE was reputed to be poorly documented in material evidence and textual production, buttressing the view that the era from late Persian to Hasmonean times was one of seamless continuity. Biblical scholars believed that no literary activity belonged to the Hellenistic age, and archaeologists were unable to refine their understanding because of a lack of secure chronological markers. However, recent studies are revealing this period as one of major social changes and intense literary activity. Historians have shed new light on the nature of the Hellenistic empires and the relationship between the central power and local entities in ancient imperial settings, and the redating of several biblical texts to the third century BCE challenges the traditional periodization of Judean history. Bringing together Hellenistic history, the archaeology of Judea, and biblical studies, this volume appraises the early Hellenistic period anew as a time of great transition and change and situates Judea within its broader regional and transregional imperial contexts.

Download or read book The Gods of Egypt written by Claude Traunecker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gods of Egypt, first published in France in 1992 and now in its third French edition, is a short, elegant, and highly accessible survey of ancient Egyptian religion. The clarity and brevity of Claude Traunecker's book make it especially valuable to readers seeking an authoritative introduction to this complex topic. The Cornell edition, the first English translation, is enhanced by 23 illustrations. Traunecker begins with an overview of the source materials and a discussion of the historiography of Egyptian religion, a subject relatively neglected by scholars. He then describes the actual and metaphysical worlds inhabited by the Egyptian deities and the role that humans played in the Egyptian universe. Focusing especially on the diversity and number of approaches used by Egyptians to explain their world, The Gods of Egypt offers a succinct and highly readable presentation of recent interpretations of Egyptian religion.

Download or read book The Walking Dead at Saqqara written by Lara Weiss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funerary rituals and the cult of the dead are classics of research in religious studies, especially for ancient Egypt. Still, we know relatively little about how people interacted in daily life at the city of Memphis and its Saqqara necropolis in the late second millennium BCE. By focussing on lived ancient religion, we can see that the social and religious strategies employed by the individuals at Saqqara are not just means on the way to religious, post-mortem salvation, nor is their self-representation simply intended to manifest social status. On the contrary, the religious practices at Saqqara show in their complex spatiality a wide spectrum of options to configure sociality before and after one's own death. The analytical distinction between religion and other forms of human practices and sociality illuminates the range of cultural practices and how people selected, modified, or even avoided certain religious practices. As a result, pre-funerary, funerary and practices of the subsequent mortuary cults, in close connection with religious practices directed towards other ancestors and deities, allow the formation of imagined and functioning reminiscence clusters as central social groups at Saqqara, creating a heuristic model applicable also to other contexts.

Download or read book Ritual Landscape and Performance written by Christina Geisen and published by Yale Egyptology. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual Landscape and Performance contains the peer-reviewed Egyptological contributions from the homonymous conference held at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations of Yale University on September 23-24, 2016. The various articles discuss the use of ritual landscape from the Old to the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, by focusing on landscape archaeology of specific sites such as Saqqara, el-Bersheh, Abydos, Thebes, as well as Aniba in Nubia. Further contributions elucidate the interaction of desert and the Nile Valley through rock art, the depictions of watery environments in the delta and their association to rituals, as well as the habitation of landscapes using the example of southern Middle Egypt.

Download or read book Proceedings of the Ninth International Dakhleh Oasis Project Conference written by Colin A. Hope and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-01-19 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume in the Oasis Papers series marks the 40th anniversary of archaeological fieldwork in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert under the leadership of Anthony J. Mills and presents a synthesis of the current state of our knowledge of the oasis and its interconnections with surrounding regions, especially the Nile Valley. The papers are by distinguished authorities in the field and postgraduate students who specialise in different aspects of Dakhleh and presents an almost complete survey of the archaeology of Dakhleh including much unpublished, original material. It will be one of the few to document a specific part of modern Egypt in such detail and thus should have a broad and lasting appeal. The content of some of the papers is unlikely to be published in any other form elsewhere. Dakhleh is possibly the most intensively examined wider geographic region within Egypt.

Download or read book Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds written by Thomas Francis Scanlon and published by Oxford Readings in Classical S. This book was released on 2014 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Minoan bull-leaping to the ancient Olympics and the enigmas of their contests, this first volume of Sport in the Greek and Roman Worlds contains nine articles and chapters of enduring importance to the study of sport in ancient Greece, a field located at a crucial intersection of social history, archaeology, literature, and other aspects of Greek culture. The studies have been updated with addenda by the original authors, and two of the articles that were originally published in German or French have been translated into English here for the first time. The studies, selected for breadth and importance of historical topics, include: Greek sport in its epic, heroic, and Bronze Age origins; the ancient Olympics in its relation to religion, politics, and diversity of competitors; Greek events in track and field and equestrian events. A companion second volume complements this one with studies on the social and economic aspects of Greek sport, the role of Greek sport in the Roman era, and forms, functions and venues of Roman spectacles. The articles in both volumes offer an excellent starting point to inspire newcomers to the study of ancient sport, and to give students and scholars an informative set of models for present knowledge and future research.

Download or read book Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean written by Thomas Galoppin and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient religions are definitely complex systems of gods, which resist our understanding. Divine names provide fundamental keys to gain access to the multiples ways gods were conceived, characterized, and organized. Among the names given to the gods many of them refer to spaces: cities, landscapes, sanctuaries, houses, cosmic elements. They reflect mental maps which need to be explored in order to gain new knowledge on both the structure of the pantheons and the human agency in the cultic dimension. By considering the intersection between naming and mapping, this book opens up new perspectives on how tradition and innovation, appropriation and creation play a role in the making of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. Far from being confined to sanctuaries, in fact, gods dwell in human environments in multiple ways. They move into imaginary spaces and explore the cosmos. By proposing a new and interdiciplinary angle of approach, which involves texts, images, spatial and archeaeological data, this book sheds light on ritual practices and representations of gods in the whole Mediterranean, from Italy to Mesopotamia, from Greece to North Africa and Egypt. Names and spaces enable to better define, differentiate, and connect gods.

Download or read book Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt written by Jan Assmann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-14 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Human beings," the acclaimed Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes, "are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge." In his new book, Assmann explores images of death and of death rites in ancient Egypt to provide startling new insights into the particular character of the civilization as a whole. Drawing on the unfamiliar genre of the death liturgy, he arrives at a remarkably comprehensive view of the religion of death in ancient Egypt. Assmann describes in detail nine different images of death: death as the body being torn apart, as social isolation, the notion of the court of the dead, the dead body, the mummy, the soul and ancestral spirit of the dead, death as separation and transition, as homecoming, and as secret. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt also includes a fascinating discussion of rites that reflect beliefs about death through language and ritual.