Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction pdf

[...]... and animals as a combination of frontal and sideways elements, and the use of size as a means of indicating each individual’s relative importance The latter is very much the iconography of power Ancient Egypt 2 Lintel 8 at Yaxchilan showing a Maya act of capture, c.AD 755 captives’ He makes a fascinating comparison with a Maya scene on a carved lintel from Yaxchilan, showing a ruler called Bird-Jaguar... symmetrical geographical setting there developed a sophisticated culture, many aspects of which invariably shared these same qualities of balance and harmony 10 The archaeology of pharaonic Egypt spans three millennia (c.3100– 332 bc) and encompasses a diverse body of artefacts, architecture, texts, and organic remains Museums throughout the world contain millions of Egyptian antiquities, and an even greater... people rather than a town or geographical area: Plundered is Canaan with every evil; carried off is Ashkelon; seized upon is Gezer; Yanoam is made as that which does not exist; Israel is laid waste, his seed is not; Hurru has become a widow for Egypt All lands together, they are pacified However, as this translated extract shows, the stele actually tells us very little about the origins or nature of Israel,... reality These two men, both clean-shaven, evidently represent high officials The one to the left is evidently a sandal-bearer, since he carries a pair of sandals in one hand and and a small vessel in the other, while a pectoral, or perhaps royal seal, is tied around his neck by a cord A single hieroglyph in a rectangular frame or box is placed behind and above his head; this sign, probably being a representation... king, and above the captive, the falcon-god Horus hovers, holding a schematically rendered captive by a rope attached to the man’s nose This captive has six papyri protruding from his back, and it has been suggested that this identifies the rebus as ‘6,000 captives’, on the basis that each of the papyrus plants already signifies the number 1,000 as they later would in the pharaonic 6 period An alternative... of remains are still in situ in the Nile Valley and the Delta, ranging from temples, tombs, and cities to remote rock inscriptions carved on crags in the Libyan Desert, the Eastern Desert, or the Sinai peninsula Three principal factors have facilitated the survival of an unusual wealth of detail concerning pharaonic Egypt: first, an elite group’s penchant for grandiose and elaborate funerary arrangements,... Egyptian state to the nature of Egyptian art and writing No single object can necessarily typify an entire culture, but the Narmer Palette is one of a few surviving artefacts from the Nile Valley that are so iconic and so rich in information that they can act as microcosms of certain aspects of ancient Egyptian culture as a whole 1 1a Front view of the Narmer Palette, c.3000 BC 1b Back view of the Narmer... Line-drawing of Lintel 8 at Yaxchilan (Chiapas, Mexico) c ad 755 8 Drawing by Ian Graham, Corpus of Maya Hieroglyptic Inscriptions (Peabody Museum Press), fig V3, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, © President and Fellows of Harvard College 3 Illustration from The Panorama of Egypt and Nubia, published in 1838 21 4 The major sites in Egypt and Nubia 22 5 Plan... representation of a reed float (but of uncertain meaning in this context), is usually rendered phonetically as db3 He also has two different signs in front of his head, apparently a superimposed rosette sign and the hm sign that ˙ later came to have several meanings, including ‘servant’ The official to the right is represented at a slightly larger scale, and is shown wearing a wig and a leopard-skin... Anatomy of a Civilisation (much recommended as a fairly long introduction to ancient Egypt), We can, as it were, walk in and out of [the Egyptians’] thought processes without being too aware of their strangeness because their language and images are a part of the process by which, from birth, we in the west classify reality My ancient Egypt is very much an imagined world, though I hope that it cannot . Introductions available now: ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOTLE.