Books in the Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context series

This Element 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.

Egypt and the Desert presents the complex relationship between the civilizations of the ancient Nile Valley and the desert territories that surround them. Themes include the invention of hieroglyphs, the desert as living entity, and how the Egyptian administered the vast barren terrain.

This discussion will be centered on 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.

The Nile is one example of a large river interacting with a civilisation. A number of other rivers in China, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere share similarities with the Nile. Students of these other rivers may be interested in this Element.

This Element provides a new evaluation of burial customs in New Kingdom Egypt, from about 1550 to 1077 BC, with an emphasis on burials of the wider population.

This Element demonstrates how ceramics, a dataset that is more typically identified with chronology than social analysis, can forward the study of Egyptian society writ large. This Element argues that the sheer mass of ceramic material indicates the importance of pottery to Egyptian life. Ceramics form a crucial dataset with which Egyptology must critically engage, and which necessitate working with the Egyptian past using a more fluid theoretical toolkit. This Element will demonstrate how ceramics may be employed in social analyses through a focus on four broad areas of inquiry: regionalism; ties between province and state, elite and non-elite; domestic life; and the relationship of political change to social change. While the case studies largely come from the Old through Middle Kingdoms, the methods and questions may be applied to any period of Egyptian history.