Download or read book The Fayum Landscape written by Claire J. Malleson and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2019-04-19 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located some one hundred kilometers southwest of Cairo, the Fayum region has long been regarded as unique, often described in terms that conjure up images of an idealized Garden of Eden. In An Egyptian Landscape, Claire Malleson takes a novel approach to the study of the region by exploring the ways in which people have, through millennia, perceived and engaged with the Fayum landscape. Distinguishing between the experienced landscape of state and bureaucratic record and the imagined landscape of myth, meaning, and observers’ personal influences and expectations, Malleson questions in detail where those perceptions come from. She traces religious practices, follows the tracks of myths and traditions, and investigates the roots of stories found in texts from the pharaonic, classical, and Medieval Islamic periods. She also reviews many, more recent travel writings on the region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The work of each author is presented in its historical and cultural context, and Malleson integrates what is known about ancient activities in the Fayum, based on the archaeological evidence from the many monuments and ancient settlements that exist in the region. Scholars and students of archaeology and landscape studies as well as general readers interested in Egypt’s history and archaeology will find this book highly engaging and enlightening.
Download or read book Imagined and Experienced written by Claire Joanna Malleson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fayum Landscape written by Claire J. Malleson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located some one hundred kilometers southwest of Cairo, the Fayum region has long been regarded as unique, often described in terms that conjure up images of an idealized Garden of Eden. In An Egyptian Landscape, Claire Malleson takes a novel approach to the study of the region by exploring the ways in which people have, through millennia, perceived and engaged with the Fayum landscape. Distinguishing between the experienced landscape of state and bureaucratic record and the imagined landscape of myth, meaning, and observers’ personal influences and expectations, Malleson questions in detail where those perceptions come from. She traces religious practices, follows the tracks of myths and traditions, and investigates the roots of stories found in texts from the pharaonic, classical, and Medieval Islamic periods. She also reviews many, more recent travel writings on the region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The work of each author is presented in its historical and cultural context, and Malleson integrates what is known about ancient activities in the Fayum, based on the archaeological evidence from the many monuments and ancient settlements that exist in the region. Scholars and students of archaeology and landscape studies as well as general readers interested in Egypt’s history and archaeology will find this book highly engaging and enlightening.
Download or read book The Nile Natural and Cultural Landscape in Egypt written by Harco Willems and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Herodot's dictum that "Egypt is a gift of the Nile" is proverbial, there has been only scant attention to the way the river impacted on ancient Egyptian society. Egyptologists frequently focus on the textual and iconographic record, whereas archaeologists and earth scientists approach the issue from the perspective of natural sciences. The contributions in this volume bridge this gap by analyzing the river both as a natural and as a cultural phenomenon. Adopting an approach of cultural ecology, it addresses issues like ancient land use, administration and taxation, irrigation, and religious concepts.
Download or read book The Desert Fayum Reinvestigated written by Simon J. Holdaway and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2017-12-31 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Neolithic is thought to have arrived in Egypt via diffusion from an origin in southwest Asia, relatively late compared to neighboring locations. The authors suggest an alternative approach to understanding the development of food production in Egypt based on the results of new fieldwork in the Fayum. They provide the results of a detailed study of the Fayum archaeological landscape interpretable at different temporal and spatial scales, using an expanded version of low-level food production to organize observations concerning paleoenvironment, socioeconomy, settlement, and mobility. While domestic plants and animals were indeed introduced from elsewhere, when a number of aspects of the archaeological record are compared, a settlement system is suggested that has no obvious analogues with the Neolithic in southwest Asia. The results obtained from the Fayum are used to assess other contemporary sites in Egypt.
Download or read book Landscape History of Hadramawt written by Michael J. Harrower and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of AIA's 2022 Anna Marguerite McCann Award for Fieldwork Reports The rugged highlands of southern Yemen are one of the less archaeologically explored regions of the Near East. This final report of survey and excavations by the Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) Project addresses the development of food production and human landscapes, topics of enduring interest as scholarly conceptualizations of the Anthropocene take shape. Along with data from Manayzah, site of the earliest dated remains of clearly domesticated animals in Arabia, the volume also documents some of the earliest water management technologies in Arabia, thereby anchoring regional dates for the beginnings of pastoralism and of potential farming. The authors argue that the initial Holocene inhabitants of Wadi Sana were Arabian hunters who adopted limited pastoral stock in small social groups, then expanded their social collectives through sacrifice and feasts in a sustained pastoral landscape. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience of archaeologists including not only those working in Arabia, but more broadly those interested in the ancient Near East, Africa, South Asia, and in Holocene landscape histories generally.
Download or read book Landscapes and Landforms of Egypt written by Nabil Sayed Embabi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-24 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a unique reference resource not only for geomorphologists, but for all Earth scientists. It shows how landforms vary enormously across Egypt, from high mountains to endless plains, and presents the vast heritage of forms that have developed under different climates. Richly illustrated with numerous plates and figures, it also includes a bibliography offering exhaustive coverage of the literature.
Download or read book The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey written by Christopher Beard and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-12-20 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Ancient Perspectives written by Richard J. A. Talbert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.
Download or read book Fayoum Pottery written by R. Neil Hewison and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A BEST NEW POTTERY BOOK TO READ IN 2022 BY THE BOOK AUTHORITY Lavishly illustrated with over 250 full-color photographs of unique designs and rare methods, providing an in-depth look at the pottery produced in the Fayoum The Fayoum, a broad, fertile depression in Egypt’s Western Desert, known for its great salt lake, its rich green fields, and its unique pharaonic and Greco-Roman remains, is also home to three very different centers of pottery production. The potters of Kom Oshim specialize in decorated garden pots and other utilitarian ware, and guard the special secret of how to make the largest clay vessels in Egypt, up to an extraordinary two and a half meters tall. At al-Nazla, ancient traditions are kept alive, as members of a single extended family continue to use millennia-old techniques passed down from generation to generation, hand-forming among other things their distinctive spherical water jars with amazing dexterity and speed. In the small village of Tunis, the establishment of a pottery school by a Swiss couple in 1990 led to a complete transformation, and the village now hosts more than twenty-five pottery workshops and showrooms, whose products are sold in Cairo, London, and New York. In this lively insight into a varied and vital craft, the author reveals the stories of the three villages and the skilled potters who make their living there, looking at how they learned their trade and how they work, from the preparation of the clay to the formation of the pots on the wheel or by hand, to the decoration, the glazing, and the firing, and finally to the display or distribution and sale of the finished product. For past and future travelers to Egypt, lovers of the craft of pottery, practitioners, and collectors, this beautifully illustrated exploration of the ceramics of the Fayoum will inspire and enchant.
Download or read book Excavations at the Seila Pyramid and Fag el Gamous Cemetery written by Kerry Muhlestein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Excavations at the Seila Pyramid and Fag el-Gamous Cemetery, Kerry Muhlestein and team offer new information that will help shape thinking about the dawn of the pyramid age and life during cultural and religious change in Egypt’s Graeco-Roman Fayoum.
Download or read book Mapping the Past From Sampling Sites and Landscapes to Exploring the Archaeological Continuum written by Michel Dabas and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proceedings of Session VIII-1 of the XVIII UISPP World Congress (2018, Paris); papers reflect on the need to develop sustainable and reliable approaches to mapping our landscape heritage, guided by the crucial concept termed the ‘archaeological continuum’.
Download or read book Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity written by Ralph Haussler and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.
Download or read book The Nile Basin written by Martin Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nile Basin contains a record of human activities spanning the last million years. However, the interactions between prehistoric humans and environmental changes in this area are complex and often poorly understood. This comprehensive book explains in clear, non-technical terms how prehistoric environments can be reconstructed, with examples drawn from every part of the Nile Basin. Adopting a source-to-sink approach, the book integrates events in the Nile headwaters with the record from marine sediment cores in the Nile Delta and offshore. It provides a detailed record of past environmental changes throughout the Nile Basin and concludes with a review of the causes and consequences of plant and animal domestication in this region and of the various prehistoric migrations out of Africa into Eurasia and beyond. A comprehensive overview, this book is ideal for researchers in geomorphology, climatology and archaeology.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt written by Morris L. Bierbrier and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Third Edition covers the whole range of the history of ancient Egypt from the Prehistoric Period until the end of Roman rule in Egypt based on the latest information provided by academic scholars and archaeologists. This is done through a revised introduction on the history of ancient Egypt, the dictionary section has over 1,000 dictionary entries on historical figures, geographical locations, important institutions and other facets of ancient Egyptian civilization. This is followed by two appendices one of which is a chronological table of Egyptian rulers and governors and the other a list of all known museums which contain ancient Egyptian objects. The volume ends with a detailed bibliography of Egyptian historical periods, archaeological sites, general topics such as pyramids, languages and arts and crafts and the publications of Egyptian material in museums throughout the world.
Download or read book African Landscapes written by Michael Bollig and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape studies provide a crucial perspective into the interaction between humans and their environment, shedding insight on social, cultural, and economic topics. The research explores both the way that natural processes have affected the development of culture and society, as well as the ways that natural landscapes themselves are the product of historical and cultural processes. Most previous studies of the landscape selectively focused on either the natural sciences or the social sciences, but the research presented in African Landscapes bridges that gap. This work is unique in its interdisciplinary scope. Over the past twelve years, the contributors to this volume have participated in the collaborative research center ACACIA (Arid Climate Adaptation and Cultural Innovation in Africa), which deals with the relationship between cultural processes and ecological dynamics in Africa’s arid areas. The case studies presented here come from mainly Sahara/Sahel and southwestern Africa, and are all linked to broader discussions on the concept of landscape, and themes of cultural, anthropological, geographical, botanical, sociological, and archaeological interest. The contributions in this work are enhanced by full color photographs that put the discussion in context visually.
Download or read book Mysterious Lands written by David O'Connor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mysterious Lands covers two kinds of encounters. First, encounters which actually occurred between Egypt and specific foreign lands, and second, those the Egyptians created by inventing imaginary lands. Some of the actual foreign lands are mysterious, in that we know of them only through Egyptian sources, both written and pictorial, and the actual locations of such lands remain unknown. These encounters led to reciprocal influences of varying intensity. The Egyptians also created imaginary lands (pseudo-geographic entities with distinctive inhabitants and cultures) in order to meet religious, intellectual and emotional needs. Scholars disagree, sometimes vehemently, about the locations and cultures of some important but geographically disputed actual lands. As for imaginary lands, they continually need to be re-explored as our understanding of Egyptian religion and literature deepens. Mysterious Lands provides a clear account of this subject and will be a stimulating read for scholars, students or the interested public.
