It took me a while to figure out the backbone running through my intellectual interests, but I’ve always been interested in languages. I had the privilege of studying Japanese in Tokyo, near the peak of the Japanese economic “miracle.” That led to a PhD in Japanese drama (focusing on noh). Once I got tenure, I had the opportunity to add ancient Egypt to my professional profile. I learned hieroglyphs, studied Egyptian religion and art, and while continuing to work on noh drama, I (finally) figured out that what interests me is the way people express, or construct, their identities in literature and art.
I wrote
ReMembering Osiris: Number, Gender, and the Word in Ancient Egyptian Representational Systems
Barry Kemp’s The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its People takes full advantage of the best discernible city plan in all of ancient Egyptian history.
Using it, he presents the ancient city with both its glories and its warts, at just the time that Egyptian culture itself was undergoing a momentous disruption—or was it a transformation?—intellectually, religiously, and in the arts. His archaeological expertise brings striking insights, and abundant illustrations show us the city from multiple perspectives.
Line drawings from Amarnan tombs and temples bring genuine ancient Egyptian voices into the discussion. Kemp’s anthropological grounding, his straightforward but eloquent prose, and his sympathy for the ancients in their everyday lives make this a book you can almost inhabit yourself.
A companion to Abydos in the New Aspects of Antiquity series, this book - a remarkable evocation of an ancient city - brings together for the first time the history of the site of Tell el-Amarna from its foundation by the pharaoh Akhenaten in c . 1344 bc to its abandonment just 16 or 17 years later, a few years after his death. Nine chapters cover the king's choice of the site and its development, the layout of the city and its buildings, and puts it in the context of the society of the time. Over 260 illustrations, some 50…
Jan Assmann’s Mind of Egypt surveys the intellectual and philosophical topography of Egypt from earliest times to well past “the ancient” and into the world of “late antiquity.” He can do this because, of course, of his great erudition, but also because it’s the serious intellectual or philosophical strains of Egyptian culture that he attends to.
The original title was Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, not inaccurately translated as “The Mind of Egypt”, but Sinn means a bunch of things, among them, the English word “meaning,” so another way of translating the title would give us Egypt: A History of (its) Meaning, and that would imply not only what Egypt means to us today, but also what “meaning” meant in ancient Egypt itself: how did Egypt think.
The Mind of Egypt presents an unprecedented account of the mainsprings of Egyptian civilization - the ideals, values, mentalities, belief systems, and aspirations that shaped the first territorial state in human history. Drawing on a range of literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources, renowned historian Jan Assmann reconstructs a world of unparalleled complexity, a culture that, long before others, possessed an extraordinary degree of awareness and self-reflection. - Moving through successive periods of Egyptian civilization, from its beginnings in the Fifth Millennium b.c. until the rise of Christianity 4,500 years later, Assmann traces the crucial roles of the Pharaohs, the Priests,…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Heinrich Schäfer’s Principles of Egyptian Art in John Baines’ meticulously patient translation shows us how well we can already read Egyptian art, because of lots of assumptions about seeing that we share with the people of the ancient Nile, and it also shows where we diverge in such readings.
This is a dense and demanding book, though, but one that you needn’t read from beginning to end in a single stream. You can come back to it time and time again, and the hundreds of line drawings and solid section of b/w glossy photos opens your eyes to the exquisite visual system the Egyptians devised for themselves (and us) and used for four thousand years and more.
John Romer’s Ancient Lives, the Story of the Pharaohs’ Tombmakers, like Kemp’s book, is about urban life, but the urbs is not a city per se, but a village.
In this case, though, it’s the village of the workers who excavated, crafted, painted, and consecrated the great royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings, so this “village” is intricately related to a great city on the Nile. Romer had access to a cast of personalities sketched from documents, read off of limestone flakes, potsherds, and administrative and judicial papyri.
He resuscitates networks of gossip and brings us within earshot of personal rivalries and property disputes, uncovers an audacious tomb robbery along the way, and following the trial of its perpetrators.
More than 3000 years ago a village was established at Thebes on the west bank of the Nile. Situated amid a barren and arid landscape, it housed the workers who created the tombs of the Pharaohs and the Valley of the Kings. It was through death and the ritual of burial that the Pharaohs became gods, and their elaborately carved and decorated temples were an essential part of this mystical process. Stonemasons, painters, sculptors, quarrymen, lived with their wives and children in the village, and worked closely together in the sacred valley. As well as building the magnificent tombs of…
1184 BCE. Ramesses III, who will become the last of the great pharaohs, is returning home from battle. He will one day assume the throne of the Egyptian empire, and the plots against him and his children have already started. Even a god can die.
Royal Women of Amarna is the catalog of an exhibition of many years ago, but used copies are still available, and it contains some of the most fascinating images and commentary on the ravishing sculptures of women (and some men) from the world of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
Introductory material provides context, but the heart of the book is in four chapters written by a longtime curator at the Metropolitan Museum NYC, now emerita. They cover various aspects of portraiture discussing the startling changes in the representation of the human figure in the Amarna period (ca. 1353-1336 BCE), the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, from which Nefertiti’s iconic bust was recovered, and other aspects of the art and religion of the era.
During a brief seventeen-year reign (ca. 1353-1336 B.C.) the pharaoh Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, founder of the world's first known monotheistic religion, devoted his life and the resources of his kingdom to the worship of the Aten (a deity symbolized by the sun disk) and thus profoundly affected history and the history of art. The move to a new capital, Akhetaten/Amarna, brought essential changes in the depictions of royal women. It was in their female imagery, above all, that the artists of Amarna departed from the traditional iconic representations to emphasize the individual, the natural, in a way unprecedented in Egyptian art.…
This book looks at the ways the Egyptians of pharaonic Egypt wrote about and visually represented three central features of their (or almost any) culture: language (and writing), representations of gender and sexuality, and number in the context of religious belief. The book works from line drawings of important reliefs, photos of relevant sculpture and painting, and translations of hieroglyphic texts (many of them included in glyphs). The initial printing won an award for the designers at the Stanford UP, but the print-on-demand version butchered the layout and left some of the images difficult to read. Get the original if you can.
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
