PRIVATE LIFE IN NEW KINGDOM EGYPT by Lynn Meskell ( 9780691120584 )

Item Details

Title:

PRIVATE LIFE IN NEW KINGDOM EGYPT

By:

Lynn Meskell

Format:

Paperback

List price:

£40.00

Our price:

£32.00

Discount:

20% off

You save:

£8.00

ISBN 10:

0691120587

ISBN 13:

9780691120584

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Publisher:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

4 October, 2004

Pages:

256

Description:

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. Drawing on the archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from the earlier years of the New Kingdom, this book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives, from birth to death.

Synopsis:

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detailed archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The result is a meaningful portrait composed of individual biographies, communities, and landscapes. Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences. Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.

Illustrations:

2 maps. 49 halftones. 11 line illus.

Publication:

Imprint:

Princeton University Press

Returns:

Returnable

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