Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt


Book Description

This Element is about the creation and curation of social memory in pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt. Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Ottoman sources attest to the horror that characterized catastrophic famines. Occurring infrequently and rarely reaching the canonical seven-years' length, famines appeared and disappeared like nightmares. Communities that remain aware of potentially recurring tragedies are often advantaged in their efforts to avert or ameliorate worst-case scenarios. For this and other reasons, pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egyptians preserved intergenerational memories of hunger and suffering. This Element begins with a consideration of the trajectories typical of severe Nilotic famines and the concept of social memory. It then argues that personal reflection and literature, prophecy, and an annual festival of remembrance functioned-at different times, and with varying degrees of success-to convince the well-fed that famines had the power to unseat established order and to render a comfortably familiar world unrecognizable.




Feast, Fast Or Famine


Book Description

In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the study of food and drink in the ancient, Mediaeval and Byzantine worlds and of their supply and consumption. This volume presents selected papers from the biennial conference of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, which was held at the University of Adelaide, 11-12 July 2003. The theme was food and drink in Byzantium. Published selectively in the present volume, the papers of the conference are augmented by contributions from international scholars. While some papers address the use of food directly (children's diet, fasting) or tangentially (in love spells), or discuss philosophical approaches towards food (vegetarianism), other papers in this volume examine the topic from another perspective: the role and perception of food and drink - and their consumption - in society. Yet others examine issues of supply (military logistics) and the role it played in shaping Byzantium. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the history of food, in late antique and Byzantine society, in Byzantine rhetoric, in magic in late antiquity and in the Jews in early Byzantium.




Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs


Book Description

Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs deals with ancient Egyptian concept of collective identity, various groups which inhabited the Egyptian Nile Valley and different approaches to ethnic identity in the last two hundred years of Egyptology. The aim is to present the dynamic processes of ethnogenesis of the inhabitants of the land of the pharaohs, and to place various approaches to ethnic identity in their broader scholarly and historical context. The dominant approach to ethnic identity in ancient Egypt is still based on culture historical method. This and other theoretically better framed approaches (e.g. instrumentalist approach, habitus, postcolonial approach, ethnogenesis, intersectionality) are discussed using numerous case studies from the 3rd millennium to the 1st century BC. Finally, this Element deals with recent impact of third science revolution on archaeological research on ethnic identity in ancient Egypt.




Scribal Culture in Ancient Egypt


Book Description

This Element seeks to characterize the scribal culture in ancient Egypt through its textual acts, which were of prime importance in this culture: writing, list-making, drawing, and copying.




Coffin Commerce


Book Description

This discussion will be centered on one ubiquitous and rather simple Egyptian object type – the wooden container for the human corpse. We will focus on the entire 'lifespan' of the coffin – how they were created, who bought them, how they were used in funerary rituals, where they were placed in a given tomb, and how they might have been used again for another dead person. Using evidence from Deir el Medina, we will move through time from the initial agreement between the craftsman and the seller, to the construction of the object by a carpenter, to the plastering and painting of the coffin by a draftsman, to the sale of the object, to its ritual use in funerary activities, to its deposit in a burial chamber, and, briefly, to its possible reuse.




Late Victorian Holocausts


Book Description

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.




The Archaeology of Early Egypt


Book Description

A 2006 interpretation of the emergence of farming economies and the dynastic state in Egypt c. 10,000-2,650 BC.




The Architecture of Imperialism


Book Description

This volume utilizes both archaeological and textual data pertaining to Egyptian military bases to examine the evolution of Egypt's foreign policy in the New Kingdom. The types of structures erected to house soldiers and administrators in Syria-Palestine, Nubia, and Libya differed in ways that do much to illuminate the nature of imperial aims in these subject territories.




Ancient Egyptian Imperialism


Book Description

Offers a broad and unique look at Ancient Egypt during its long age of imperialism Written for enthusiasts and scholars of pharaonic Egypt, as well as for those interested in comparative imperialism, this book provides a look at some of the most intriguing evidence for grand strategy, low-level insurgencies, back-room deals, and complex colonial dynamics that exists for the Bronze Age world. It explores the actions of a variety of Egypt’s imperial governments from the dawn of the state until 1069 BCE as they endeavored to control fiercely independent mountain dwellers in Lebanon, urban populations in Canaan and Nubia, highly mobile Nilotic pastoralists, and predatory desert raiders. The book is especially valuable as it foregrounds the reactions of local populations and their active roles in shaping the trajectory of empire. With its emphasis on the experimental nature of imperialism and its attention to cross-cultural comparison and social history, this book offers a fresh perspective on a fascinating subject. Organized around central imperial themes—which are explored in depth at particular places and times in Egypt’s history—Ancient Egyptian Imperialism covers: Trade Before Empire—Empire Before the State (c. 3500-2686); Settler Colonialism (c. 2400-2160); Military Occupation (c. 2055-1775); Creolization, Collaboration, Colonization (c. 1775-1295); Motivation, Intimidation, Enticement (c. 1550-1295); Organization and Infrastructure (c. 1458-1295); Outwitting the State (c. 1362-1332); Conversions and Contractions in Egypt’s Northern Empire (c. 1295-1136); and Conversions and Contractions in Egypt’s Southern Empire (c. 1550-1069). Offers a wider focus of Egypt’s experimentation with empire than is covered by general Egyptologists Draws analogies to tactics employed by imperial governments and by dominated peoples in a variety of historically documented empires, both old world and new Answers questions such as “how often and to what degree did imperial blueprints undergo revisions?” Ancient Egyptian Imperialism is an excellent text for students and scholars of history, comparative history, and ancient history, as well for those interested in political science, anthropology, and the Biblical World.




Hieroglyphs, Pseudo-Scripts and Alphabets


Book Description

Introduces the workings and uses of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the various degrees of cultural knowledge of their makers and – most importantly – the influence hieroglyphs had on other scripts and notations in antiquity.




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