An ancient inscription identified some of the ruins at el Amarna as ''The Place of the Letters of the Pharaoh.'' Discovered there, circa 1887, were nearly four hundred cuneiform tablets containing correspondence of the Egyptian court with rulers of neighboring states in the mid-fourteenth century B.C. Previous translations of these letters were ......
Vol. 4: The Twentieth through the Twenty-sixth Dynasties
With volume 4 of Ancient Records of Egypt, James Henry Breasted brings us to the end of the self-governed era of ancient Egyptian civilization. Chief among the documents contained in this volume are the inscriptions from the Medinet Habu Temple, one of the most completely preserved temples of Egypt, and the great Papyrus Harris, the largest (133 ......
A detailed exploration of the remaining wall scenes and texts from the tomb of Parennefer, the royal butler of the pharaoh Akhenaten, part of the archaeological site in the ancient Theban necropolis in Egypt.
Worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis dates as far back as 2500 B.C. and extended at least until the fifth century A.D. throughout the Roman world. The importance of her cult is attested to in Apuleius's Golden Ass, and evidence of its influence has been found in places as far apart as Afghanistan and Portugal, the Black Sea and northern England. ......
Biblical, Archaeological, and Egyptological Perspectives on the Exodus Narratives
The Hebrew Scriptures consider the exodus from Egypt to be Israel’s formative and foundational event. Indeed, the Bible offers no other explanation for Israel’s origin as a people. It is also true that no contemporary record regarding a man named Moses or the Israelites generally, either living in or leaving Egypt has been found. ......
Do shifts in material culture instigate administrative change, or is it the shifting political winds that affect material culture? This is the central question that Shlomit Bechar addresses in this book, taking the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (seventeenth-fourteenth centuries BCE) in northern Canaan as a test case. Combining ......
In this book, Bob Becking provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the origins, lives, and eventual fate of the Yehudites, or Judeans, at Elephantine, framed within the greater history of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire. The Yehudites were among those mercenaries recruited by the Persians to defend the southwestern border of ......
New Insights into the Judean Community and Its Neighbors
The Judean community at Elephantine has long fascinated historians of the Persian period. This book, with its stellar assemblage of important scholarly voices, provides substantive new insights and approaches that will advance the study of this well-known but not entirely understood community from fifth-century BCE Egypt. Elephantine Revisited ......
Examines the relationship between politics and material culture during the transition from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age in the southern Levant by studying architectural and ceramic changes.
Egyptological, Archaeological, and Biblical Studies in Honor of James K. Hoffmeier
James Hoffmeier is a giant in the field of Egyptology. Among his many publications are two volumes of archaeological reports from Tell el-Borg, where he headed up excavations from 1999 to 2008. He is also well known for his interest in how ancient Egypt and the biblical world intersected, having edited and written several books on the subject, ......
In this book, Bob Becking provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the origins, lives, and eventual fate of the Yehudites, or Judeans, at Elephantine, framed within the greater history of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire.
The Yehudites were among those mercenaries recruited by the Persians to defend the ......
In February, 2007, a conference entitled “Reconsidering the Concept of ‘Revolutionary Monotheism’” was convened on the campus of Princeton University. The meeting was unique in that it brought together scholars who were engaged in various disciplines of research, and though all were involved in the geographical area of ......
A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts is designed as a six-volume study of the earliest comprehensive corpus of ancient Egyptian texts, inscribed in the pyramids of five pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2325–2150 BC) and several of their queens. The first volume, devoted to the earliest corpus, that of Unis, is based on ......
Hypatia was a female philosopher and mathematician during the early Christian era in Alexandria. She was brutally murdered by a Christian mob and has become an icon for various groups. But who was the woman behind the myth? Using the available evidence these myths are dispelled and the woman who was Hypatia is visible for the first time.
This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and 2010. The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's western desert, begun in 2001 under the aegis of Columbia University and sponsored by NYU since ......
The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient Story-Collections
Holm’s book is an innovative approach to the biblical Book of Daniel. It places Daniel against the background of story-collections, an ancient genre that began in Egypt in the mid-second millennium B.C.E. This work focuses on Daniel 6–4 and provides detailed comparisons with specific bodies of story-collections and other related ......
Prophecy in Israel, Assyria, and Egypt in the Neo-Assyrian Period
Thus Speaks Ishtar is a collection of essays about prophets and prophecy in the ancient Near East during the “Neo-Assyrian Period.” This was the time when some of Israel’s greatest prophets emerged, and we also have from the same general period a number of prophetic texts found on the site of the ancient Assyrian city ......
Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Second only to Rome in the ancient world, Alexandria was home to many of late antiquity's most brilliant writers, philosophers, and theologians among them Philo, Origen, Arius, Athanasius, Hypatia, Cyril, and John Philoponus. Now, in Alexandria in Late Antiquity, Christopher ......
In From Slave to Pharaoh, noted Egyptologist Donald B. Redford examines over two millennia of complex social and cultural interactions between Egypt and the Nubian and Sudanese civilizations that lay to the south of Egypt. These interactions resulted in the expulsion of the black Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in 671 B.C. by an ......
Published in 1992, William L. Moran's definitive English translation, The Amarna Letters, raised as many questions as it answered. How did Pharaoh run his empire? Why did the god-king consent to deal with his fellow, mortal monarchs as equals? Indeed, why did kings engage in diplomacy at all? How did the great powers maintain international peace ......
Volume 3 of Ancient Records of Egypt opens on the chaotic aftermath of King Akhenaten's religious revolution. Breasted chronicles the precarious reigns of Akhenaten's successors and the political and legal reforms of King Horemheb, who succeeded to the throne after the passing of the last members of the royal family. This volume contains the ......
This volume extends Breasted's remarkable documentary history through the reign of King Tutankhamun. By providing the first definitive transcription and the first English version of hundreds of historical records inscribed on papyrus or leather or carved in stone, Breasted gave unprecedented access to details of royal succession, military ......
Vol. 1: The First through the Seventeenth Dynasties
Around the turn of the last century, James Henry Breasted took on the challenge of assembling all the available historical documents of ancient Egypt and translating them into English. This prodigious undertaking involved traveling to the monuments extant in the Nile valley and in outlying areas of Egyptian conquest, as well as to museums ......
Vol. 5: Supplementary Bibliographies and Indices (POD)
An indispensable companion to any of the other volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt, the Supplementary Bibliographies and Indices facilitates direct access to specific information on the people, places, and inscriptions catalogued by James Henry Breasted. Exhaustively compiled and intelligently arranged, these indices include the kings and queens, ......
Lionel Casson offers a comprehensive introduction to the people of ancient Egypt. He describes the structure of Egyptian society--the levels from peasant to pharaoh, the nature of the family, and the role of women. He reviews the professions, from the lowliest scribes to the architects and engineers who built the pyramids, and examines the work of ......
Protected on two sides by wide deserts and on another by the sea, the narrow strip of land watered and fertilized by the Nile was an ideal location for the development of the great civilization of Egypt. From its beginnings below the first cataract of the Nile to its long and legendary magnificence at the Nile Delta, ancient Egypt grew ever more ......
