Material and Visual Culture of Ancient Egypt – serie

The Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies is published annually on behalf of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies by Lockwood Press. The Canadian Society for Coptic Studies is a Toronto-based nonprofit organization whose purpose is to bring together individuals interested in Coptic studies and to promote the dissemination of scholarly information on Coptic Studies through the organization of meetings and conferences and through the preparation of scholarly works for publication.

This volume publishes 534 new Demotic graffiti recorded at the temple of Isis on Philae Island, presented with drawings and photographs. New editions of 101 of the graffiti that were published by F. Griffith in his Catalogue of the Demotic Papyri in the Dodecaschoenus (1937) are published here. These re-edited texts were mainly chosen because new drawings provided significant new readings from those made by Griffith, or they helped elucidate the scope and meaning of some of the new graffiti by placement. The volume also includes an essay interpreting the role of the graffiti in understanding the political and religious activities at Philae temple during the last centuries of worship of the goddess Isis, mainly by Nubian priests and pilgrims.

Conflicts and wars, and more specifically the 2011 Revolution in Egypt, have brought to light the worrying question of the preservation of the cultural heritage in the world. The roles of museums and international institutions have become ever more important in this respect.Recognizing that cultural treasures can form the basis for education and economic prosperity, the organizers devoted the 29th Annual Meeting of ICOM's International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG) to the theme of Collections at Risk: New Challenges in a New Environment.The present volume contains several of the papers read during those sessions in Brussels in 2012, and gives a clear example of the multifarious paths that lie open to obtaining the objective of preserving the past for the future.

Illuminating Osiris contains twenty-seven articles by students, friends, and colleagues in honour of Mark Smith, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. Professor Smith is especially renowned as a Demoticist and specialist in Ancient Egyptian religion. His numerous Demotic text editions and translations of Egyptian funerary and religious compositions have been enormously influential in the field. The contributions in this volume naturally reflect his particular interests in the religion and literature of Graeco-Roman period Egypt, dealing with cult, rituals, astronomy, and divination, among other subjects. The book includes many editions or reeditions of texts written in Demotic, Hieratic, and Ptolemaic Hieroglyphs.   It is profusely illustrated in colour and b&w, and supplied with detailed indexes.

The thirty-nine articles in this volume, One Who Loves Knowledge, have been contributed by colleagues, students, friends and family in honour of Richard Jasnow, professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University. Despite his claiming to be “just a demoticist,” Richard Jasnow’s research interests and specialties are broad, spanning religious and historical topics, along with new editions of demotic texts, including most particularly the Book of Thoth. A number of the authors demonstrate their appreciation for Jasnow’s contributions to the understanding of this difficult text. The volume also includes other studies on literature, Ptolemaic history and even the god Thoth himself. It features detailed images and abundant hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, Coptic and Greek texts.

Building on the work of Ronald J. Leprohon, to whom it is dedicated, contributions in this volume present an overview of our current state of understanding of patterns of identity and self-presentation in ancient Egypt.The wish to affiliate with a specific cultural, social or ethnic group is as important today as it was in past societies, such as that of the ancient Egyptians. The same significance applies to the self-presentation of an individual within such a group. Although it is inevitable that we perceive ancient cultures through the lens of our own time and place and value systems, we can certainly try to look beyond these limitations. Questions of how the ancient Egyptians saw themselves and how individuals tried to establish and thus present themselves in society are central pieces of the puzzle of how we interpret this ancient culture.This book focuses on the topic of identity and self-presentation in ancient Egyptian society, approaching this through studies of gender, literature, material culture, mythology, names and officialdom. It tackles the subject from many different angles: the ways in which social and personal identities are constructed and maintained; the manipulations of culture by individuals to reflect real or aspirational identities; and the methods modern scholars use to attempt to say something about ancient persons.

This volume offers the first comprehensive overview of the evolution over time of a foundational concept of the Egyptian afterlife beliefs: the Duat, or netherworld. The Duat is a complicated, multifaceted notion, which was never canonized into a single version of the beyond, but offered instead a variety of alternatives attempting to describe the metaphysical realms beyond the visible world, and beyond life. Theological speculations gave rise to a rich textual and visual repertoire, which underwent a process of evolution over thousands of years, during which newer ideas and images were constantly introduced. The book provides analysis of royal and non-royal funerary texts from the late Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom, tracing the development of the conceptualization of the notion of Duat, outlining what it encompassed and where it was imagined to be located. In addition to the translation and discussion of the most significant passages of the texts analysed, each chapter also provides an overview of the individual compositions and of the relevant theological, cosmological and astronomical notions complementing the conceptual framework, of which the Duat formed but a part. Additionally, discussions of concurrent changes in Egyptian culture, society and ideology are included in order to clarify the context in which afterlife beliefs and related texts evolved. An analysis of the correlation between funerary compositions and their material supports complements the study, emphasizing the Egyptians' belief in a magical synergy between texts, images, and their contexts in the activation of a suitable, effective afterlife for the recipients of the texts.

During the Old Kingdom, the ancient Egyptians constructed elaborately decorated mortuary monuments for their pharaohs. By the late Old Kingdom (ca. 2435-2153 BCE), these pyramid complexes began to contain a new and unique type of statue, the so-called prisoner statues. Despite being known to Egyptologists for decades, these statues of kneeling, bound foreign captives have been only partially documented, and questions surrounding their use, treatment, and exact meaning have remained unanswered.Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues—the first comprehensive analysis of the prisoner statues—addresses this gap, demonstrating that the Egyptians conceived of and used the prisoner statues differently over time as a response to contemporary social, cultural, and historical changes. In the process, the author contributes new data and interpretations on topics as diverse as the purpose and function of the pyramid complex, the ways in which the Egyptians understood and depicted ethnicity, and the agency of artists in ancient Egypt. Ultimately, this volume provides a fuller understanding of not only the prisoner statues but also the Egyptian late Old Kingdom as a whole.

This memorial volume honours the life and work of Professor Lanny David Bell (April 30, 1941-August 26, 2019), a leading scholar in Egyptology and a beloved teacher and colleague to so many. It includes a biography of Dr. Bell along with contributions from eminent scholars on the topics of ancient art, archaeology, religion and philology.

Peter Lacovara has worked as a curator, archaeologist, teacher, and ceramicist during a long career in the United States and Egypt. He has played a key role in establishing and organizing groundbreaking exhibitions, written a host of popular and academic publications, created an on-line resource for the history of North American Egyptology, and also inspired and nurtured several generations of professional and amateur Egyptologists. This book comprises a series of articles dealing with subjects close to his heart, including ceramic studies, urbanism and urban archaeology, funerary archaeology, artefact studies, and the history of Egyptology, and will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts alike.