Author: Christopher Eyre
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191655295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
This volume reconstructs the history of documentary practice in pharaonic Egypt from the early Old Kingdom to the major administrative changes imposed by the colonizing regimes of the Graeco-Roman period. Relating administrative and legal practice to the physical practicalities of the media used for writing, and through the close reading of primary textual sources, it examines how different types of documents - private and official - were created and used. It explores the ways in which the writing of documents was embedded deeply in the interactions between customary social practices, which were essentially oral, and in the penetration of outside hierarchies into local government. Eyre argues that the potential of the written document as evidence or proof was never fully exploited in the pharaonic period, even though writing was a powerful symbol and display of hierarchical authority. He presents the government as a system rooted in personal prestige and patronage structures, lacking the effective departmental hierarchies and archive systems that would represent a true bureaucratic system.

Author: Christopher Eyre
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199673896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
This volume reconstructs the history of documentary practice in pharaonic Egypt from the early Old Kingdom to the administrative changes imposed by the Graeco-Roman period. It explores how the writing of documents was embedded in the interactions between customary social practices and the penetration of outside hierarchies into local government.

Author: Richard Bussmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100938063X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
In this book, Richard Bussmann presents a fresh overview of ancient Egyptian society and culture in the age of the pyramids. He addresses key themes in the comparative research of early complex societies, including urbanism, funerary culture, temple ritual, kingship, and the state, and explores how ideas and practices were exchanged between ruling elites and local communities in provincial Egypt. Unlike other studies of ancient Egypt, this book adopts an anthropological approach that places people at the centre of the analysis. Bussmann covers a range of important themes in cross-cultural debates, such as materiality, gender, non-elite culture, and the body. He also offers new perspectives on social diversity and cultural cohesion, based on recent discoveries. His study vividly illustrates how our understanding of ancient Egyptian society benefits from the application of theoretical concepts in archaeology and anthropology to the interpretation of the evidence.

Author: Brian Muhs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107113369
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
The first economic history of ancient Egypt employing a New Institutional Economics approach and covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE.

Author: Alexandre Loktionov
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803275863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
How did the Ancient Egyptians maintain control of their state? Topics include the controlling function of temples and theology, state borders, scribal administration, visual representation, patronage, and the Egyptian language itself, with reference to all periods of Egyptian history, from the Old Kingdom to Coptic times.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004375279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The volume The Materiality of Texts from Ancient Egypt contains nine contributions from well-known papyrologists, Egyptologists, archaeologists and technical specialists. They discuss the materiality of ancient writing and writing supports in various ways through methodological considerations and through practical case studies from the early Pharaonic to the Late Antique periods in Egypt, including Greek and Egyptian papyri and ostraca, inscriptions and graffiti. The articles in this volume present new approaches to the study of textual material and scribal practice, especially in the light of the ongoing development of digital techniques that uncover new information from ancient writing materials. The aim of the book is to encourage researchers of ancient texts to consider the benefits of using these new methods and technological resources.

Author: Lisa K. Sabbahy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Written by specialists in the field of Egyptology, this book is a readable introduction to ancient Egypt, covering all anticipated subjects and stressing the monuments and material culture of this remarkable ancient civilization. The rich natural resources of ancient Egypt provided a wealth of raw material for its structures, sculptures, and art, while its geographic isolation helped to ensure the survival of its rich culture for centuries. While other references focus on the people and battles central to Egyptian history, this reference explores the material culture and social institutions of ancient Egypt. The book focuses on pharaonic Egypt, covering the period from roughly 5000 BCE to the beginning of the Greco-Roman Period in 320 BCE. At the front of the work, a timeline provides a quick look at the major events in Egyptian history, and an introduction surveys ancient Egypt's physical geography and history. Alphabetically arranged reference entries written by expert contributors then provide fundamental information about the buildings, jewelry, social practices, and other topics related to the material culture and institutions that made up the Egyptian world. Excerpts from primary source historical documents provide evidence for what we know about ancient Egyptian culture, and suggestions for further reading direct users to additional sources of information.

Author: Anna Margherita Jasink
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN: 8864536361
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This volume is intended to be the first in a series that will focus on the origin of script and the boundaries of non-scribal communication media in proto-literate and literate societies of the ancient Aegean. Over the last 30 years, the domain of scribes and bureaucrats has become much better known. Our goal now is to reach below the élite and scribal levels to interface with non-scribal operations conducted by people of the ‘middling’ sort. Who made these marks and to what purpose? Did they serve private or (semi-) official roles in Bronze Age Aegean society? The comparative study of such practices in the contemporary East (Cyprus, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt) can shed light on sub-elite activities in the Aegean and also provide evidence for cultural and economic exchange networks.

Author: Niv Allon
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198841620
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Writing, Violence, and the Military takes representations of reading and writing in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt (ca. 1550-1295 BCE) as its point of departure, asking how patrons of art conceptualized literacy and how in turn they positioned themselves with respect to it. Exploring statuary and tomb art through the prism of self-representation and group formation, it makes three claims. Firstly, that the elite of this period held a variety of notions regarding literacy, among which violence and memory are most prominent. Secondly, that among the Eighteenth Dynasty elite, literacy found its strongest advocates among men whose careers brought them to engage with the military, either as military officials or as civil administrators who accompanied the army beyond the borders of Egypt. Finally, that Haremhab - the General in Chief who later ascended the throne - voiced unique views regarding literacy that arose from his career as an elite military official, and thus from his social world. Consequently, images of reading and writing allow us to study literacy with regard to those who commissioned them, and to consider these patrons' roles in changing conceptualizations. Throughout their different formulations, these representations call for a discussion on literacy in relation to self-representation and to art's role in society. They also invite us to reconsider our own approach to literacy and its significance in ancient times.

Author: Alessandro Bausi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110541572
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).