Collections of scenes and texts designated variously as the "Book of the Earth," "Creation of the Solar Disc," and "Book of Aker" were inscribed on the walls of royal sarcophagus chambers throughout Egypt's Ramessid period (Dynasties 19-20). This material illustrated discrete episodes from the nocturnal voyage of the sun god, which functioned as a model for the resurrection of the deceased king. These earliest "Books of the Earth" employed mostly ad hoc arrangements of scenes, united by shared elements of iconography, an overarching, bipartite symmetry of composition, and their frequent pairing with representations of the double sky overhead. From the Twenty-First Dynasty and later, selections of programmatic tableaux were adapted for use in private mortuary contexts, often in conjunction with innovative or previously unattested annotations. The present study collects and analyzes all currently known Book of the Earth material, including discussions of iconography, grammar, orthography, and architectural setting.

Originally published in 1975 as The Horizon Book of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, this revised edition includes a new chapter as well as full documentation of the sources.

This picture book features images of Ancient Egyptian Jewelry covering works from Pre-dynastic shell necklaces to intricately designed gold earrings of the Roman period. A brief introductory essay discusses the history of jewelry and the evolution of Ancient Egyptian jewelry craftsmanship.

Gods and goddesses—in human, animal, and other forms—were central to the ancient Egyptian way of life. Identified with the natural world, daily living, and the afterlife, they maintained order and prevented chaos from permeating the human world. The figures documented in ancient hieroglyphics are given dimension in this absorbing volume, which examines the characteristics and significance of many of the Egyptian gods and goddesses and also looks at related topics such as ancient symbols and the influence of Egyptian mythology on other cultures and belief systems.

Lectures given at a symposium held in 1987, sponsored by Fordham University.

From about 2000 BCE onward, Egypt served as an important nexus for cultural exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, importing and exporting not just wares but also new artistic techniques and styles. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman craftsmen imitated one another’s work, creating cultural and artistic hybrids that transcended a single tradition. Yet in spite of the remarkable artistic production that resulted from these interchanges, the complex vicissitudes of exchange between Egypt and the Classical world over the course of nearly 2500 years have not been comprehensively explored in a major exhibition or publication in the United States. It is precisely this aspect of Egypt’s history, however, that Beyond the Nile uncovers. Renowned scholars have come together to provide compelling analyses of the constantly evolving dynamics of cultural exchange, first between Egyptians and Greeks—during the Bronze Age, then the Archaic and Classical periods of Greece, and finally Ptolemaic Egypt—and later, when Egypt passed to Roman rule with the defeat of Cleopatra. Beyond the Nile, a milestone publication issued on the occasion of a major international exhibition, will become an indispensable contribution to the field. With gorgeous photographs of more than two hundred rare objects, including frescoes, statues, obelisks, jewelry, papyri, pottery, and coins, this volume offers an essential and inter-disciplinary approach to the rich world of artistic cross-pollination during antiquity.

The first-ever translation of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead of Sobekmose—fully illustrated and explained by a leading Egyptologist, offering fascinating insights into one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world The Book of the Dead of Sobekmose, in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, is one of the most important surviving examples of ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead. Such “books”—actually papyrus scrolls—were composed of traditional funerary texts, including magic spells, which were thought to assist the deceased on their journeys into the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians believed in an underworld fraught with dangers that needed to be carefully navigated, from the familiar, such as snakes and scorpions, to the extraordinary: lakes of fire to cross, animal-headed demons to pass, and the ritual Weighing of the Heart, whose outcome determined whether or not the deceased would be born again into the afterlife for eternity. Virtually all of the existing published translations of material from the Book of the Dead corpus are compilations of various texts drawn from a number of sources, and many translations are available only in excerpt form. This publication is the first to offer a continuous English translation of a single, extensive, major text from beginning to end in the order in which it was composed. This new translation not only represents a great step forward in the study of these texts but also grants modern readers a direct encounter with what can seem a remote and alien, though no less fascinating, civilization.