The Pyramid Texts


Book Description

The Egyptian pyramid texts, which are the basis of this work, were collected and inscribed on the walls of five royal pyramids at Sakkareh between the years 2350 and 2175 B.C. The present work is the first English translation with commentary.




Egyptian Non-Royal Epithets in the Middle Kingdom


Book Description

This analysis shows how the Egyptian non-royal epithets from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040-1640 BCE) provide new insight into the ways in which biographical self-presentation reflects religious and social attitudes and the changing relationship between elite officials and the king.







Breathing Flesh


Book Description

The ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts form a corpus of ritual spells written on the inside of coffins from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1650 BCE). Thus accompanying the deceased in a very concrete sense, the spells are part of a long Egyptian tradition of equipping the dead with ritual texts ensuring the transition from the state of a living human being to that of a deceased ancestor. The texts present a view of death as entailing threats to the function of the body, often conceptualised as bodily fragmentation or dysfunction. In the transformation of the deceased, the restoration of these bodily dysfunctions is of paramount importance, and the texts provide detailed accounts of the ritual empowerment of the body to achieve this goal. Seen from this perspective, the Coffin Texts provide a rich material for studying ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body by providing insights into the underlying structure of the body as a whole and the proper function of individual part of the body as seen by the ancient Egyptians. Drawing on a theoretical framework from cognitive linguistics and phenomenological anthropology, Breathing Flesh presents an analysis of the conceptualisation of the human body and its individual parts in the ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts. From this starting point, more overarching concepts and cultural models are discussed, including the ritual conceptualisation of the acquisition and use of powerful substances such as "magic", and the role of fertility and procreation in ancient Egyptian mortuary conceptions.




The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt


Book Description

This important new study looks at the intersection of Greek and Egyptian art forms in the funerary sphere of Roman Egypt. A discussion of artistic change, cultural identity, and religious belief foregrounds the detailed analysis of more than 150 objects and tombs, many of which are presented here for the first time. In addition to the information it provides about individual works of art, supported by catalogue entries, the study explores fundamental questions such as how artists combine the iconographies and representational forms of different visual traditions, and why two distinct visual traditions were employed in Roman Egypt.




The Hypocephalus: An Ancient Egyptian Funerary Amulet


Book Description

The hypocephalus is an element of Late Period and Ptolemaic funerary equipment—an amuletic disc placed under the head of mummies. Its shape emulates the sun’s disc, and its form is planar (although it is occasionally concave). This volume analyses the written records and iconography of these objects.




Egypt and the Classical World


Book Description

Presenting dynamic research, this publication explores two millennia of cultural interactions between Egypt, Greece, and Rome. From Mycenaean weaponry found among the cargo of a Bronze Age shipwreck off the Turkish coast to the Egyptian-inspired domestic interiors of a luxury villa built in Greece during the Roman Empire, Egypt and the Classical World documents two millennia of cultural and artistic interconnectedness in the ancient Mediterranean. This volume gathers pioneering research from the Getty scholars' symposium that helped shape the major international loan exhibition Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018). Generously illustrated essays consider a range of artistic and other material evidence, including archaeological finds, artworks, papyri, and inscriptions, to shed light on cultural interactions between Egypt, Greece, and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Late Period and Ptolemaic dynasty to the Roman Empire. The military's role as a conduit of knowledge and ideas in the Bronze Age Aegean, and an in-depth study of hieroglyphic Egyptian inscriptions found on Roman obelisks offer but two examples of scholarly lacunae addressed by this publication. Specialists across the fields of art history, archaeology, Classics, Egyptology, and philology will benefit from the volume's investigations into syncretic processes that enlivened and informed nearly twenty-five hundred years of dynamic cultural exchange. The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/egypt-classical-world/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.




The Revival of Atumism: The Ancient Egyptian Religion Part 1


Book Description

The word Atumism derives from ‘Atum,’ the manifestation of the All-Lord in creating the sphere of earth and the creature Adam. The words ‘Atumian’ and ‘Atumianity,’ addressed here by the meaning of ‘Human’ and ‘Humanity,’ are derived from ‘Atum’ who is ‘Adam.’ In the Egyptian literature, there is a thin line that differentiates ‘Atum’ and ‘Atum.’ Why denominate the Egyptian Religion by the term “Atumism”? The answer is found in multitude of diverse notions embedded in the Egyptian speech and makes the term in its profoundness the most right for a religion that has been of divine revelation millennia ahead of A. D. This book is a fusion of the earlier research titled “Ancient Egypt: The Primal Age of Divine Revelation, Volume I and II.