Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt

Description

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This path-breaking 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 startling portrait composed of individual biographies, communities, and landscapes.

Lynn Meskell is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and Field Director of a major urban excavation in Egypt. She is the founding editor of the "Journal of Social Archaeology", the author of "Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Et Cetera in Ancient Egypt", and the editor of "Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics, and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East".

"Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt is a happy example of a synthesis of factual knowledge and theoretical questioning. It has much to say, both about a particular and well-documented society and about the nature of the suppositions that a modern scholar needs to bring to such a society to make sense of it... [It] brings together an impressive range of material, sets this material sensibly in context and uses the testimony of an ancient society to remind us what it is to be human, and how life's challenges and limitations need to be met."--John Ray, Times Higher Education Supplement "Drawing on extensive archaeological and textual evidence ... Meskell draws a richly nuanced picture of life in an Egyptian village in New Kingdom Egypt, using the concept of human life cycle as her organizing framework."--Choice "For [general readers] the book will clearly be an extremely useful source for understanding the private lives of the Egyptians at this time. For Egyptologists it should provide a unified, up-to-date view of this aspect of the subject and Lynn Meskell has done scholars a service in writing it."--Helen Strudwick, Antiquity "Informative, well researched, entertaining, and [it] makes an important contribution to the field."--Ellen Morris, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology