Brendan Hainline – författare

A rare and captivating look at ancient Egyptian deities that demystifies their complex iconography to illuminate three millennia of life and religious practice  Ancient Egyptian religious practice flourished across millennia and encompassed a staggering array of gods, goddesses, and other divine beings. This publication outlines the rich iconography used to represent Egyptian deities—from the stately falcon-headed Horus, associated with power and kingship, to the fearsome lion-headed Sakhmet—and explores how these representations evolved alongside the roles of the gods themselves. Illustrated with more than 300 exceptional works of art, including statuary, figurines, jewelry, animal mummies, and coffins, Divine Egypt examines the expansive set of features used to symbolize more than 20 deities and their variations while also familiarizing readers with the meaning and cultural significance of each figure. World-renowned scholars explain how the ancient Egyptians recognized and understood divine images and the otherworldly nature of their gods. Essential reading for lovers of Egyptian art, this book enriches our understanding of not only the deities of ancient Egypt but also the lives of all strata of ancient Egyptian society.  Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(October 12, 2025–January 19, 2026)

This book investigates the linguistic diversity of the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts and what this diversity can reveal about the origins of the corpus and, more broadly, ancient Egypt in the Old Kingdom. It argues that the inclusion of linguistically diverse ritual utterances in the royal corpus of the Pyramid Texts was an intentional and active program by the royal court to incorporate ritual practices from the entire spectrum of Egyptian geography and society into the mortuary texts used by the king. The inclusion of ritual utterances representing all of Egypt thereby legitimized and monumentalized the authority of the king as the ruler of the totality of Egypt. In the book, the author describes the different categories of linguistic variation that exist in the Pyramid Texts. For each variant, there is a discussion of geographical, social, or chronological markers in the ritual utterances themselves that give clues as to where, when, or by whom that particular language variety would have been used. The author also draws on comparisons with Old Kingdom texts outside of the Pyramid Texts in order to map the distribution of the discussed linguistic variants throughout Egypt in order to produce a dialectical sketch of Old Kingdom Egypt. Additionally, this book situates the collection of the Pyramid Texts corpus into the historical context of the end of the Old Kingdom.