Editor-in-chief – Journal of Egyptian History – Brill

2024

In HIST 404 we will survey the broad sweep of ancient Egyptian history, from the first agricultural settlements on the Nile down to the Roman period (ca. 5,000 BCE to the 4 th c. CE). Our main textbook focuses on ancient Egypt's main phases and major themes, and so will we. We will look at how Egyptian society organized its macro-systems-governmental, legal, economic, military, and religious systems and institutions-and examine micro-systems, i.e., agrarian and urban families and households, as well as the variety of skills and ocupations that formed the building blocks of Egypt's economy (supplementing where needed with chapters and articles from other authors). We will also look at the development of Egyptian cultural ideas and practices, including language, writing, literature (another one of your assigned books), arts and entertainments and, along the way, the cultural influences of Egypt on other societies and vice-versa through colonization and conquest, and through peaceful cultural exchanges in social and commercial contexts.

all the subdisciplines into which Egyptology is divided, history (and history writing) has long had to suffer the status of poor cousin. While other Egyptologists bring to the field of enquiry up-to-date interests and techniques from such trendy pursuits as economics, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, art history, or even the applied sciences, the historian has seldom updated his attempts by examining and learning from the ongoing debate among so-called "professional" historians. It may be too late in any case: if the post-modern endists' are correct, and history is at an end1 after the "down-and-up" of the last 250 years,2 Egyptological historians may find themselves left to chew over yesterday's irrelevancies, using a mode of discourse which is obsolete and even dangerous. 3 We also labor in a vineyard in a part of the world which is under a cloud in some quarters. Since the 1960s sub-Mediterranean or 'African' history has suffered the indignity of a condescending, if not downright demeaning, attitude on the part of European historians. H. R. Trevor-Roper in 1965 characterized the history of Africa as nothing more than "the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant quarters of the globe."4 Others have pointed to the lack of a "sense" of history-in an Hellenic tradition, of course-among African communities, or to the paucity of written sources. The oral nature of historical tradition and transmission,5 it is argued, undermine attempts to write serious history, thus leaving the breach to be filled by more suitable investigators, say, anthropologists.

2023

This volume challenges assumptions about—and highlights new approaches to—the study of ancient Egyptian society by tackling various thematic social issues through structured individual case studies. The reader will be presented with questions about the relevance of the past in the present. The chapters encourage an understanding of Egypt in its own terms through the lens of power, people, and place, offering a more nuanced understanding of the way Egyptian society was organized and illustrating the benefits of new approaches to topics in need of a critical re-examination. By re-evaluating traditional, long-held beliefs about a monolithic, unchanging ancient Egyptian society, this volume writes a new narrative—one unchecked assumption at a time. Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches is intended for anyone studying ancient Egypt or ancient societies more broadly, including undergraduate and graduate students, Egyptologists, and scholars in adjacent fields.

VIIIth European Conference of Egyptologists: CECE8, 2020

The publication provides an overview of current research and its perspectives covering various spheres of interest in present-day Egyptology and a scholarly discussion on various approaches to studies of ancient Egypt in all its aspects and forms. The reader may find 26 papers, including those on pottery, sculpture, language, history, architecture, religion and religious texts, views on empire creation, loyalism and more detailed pieces on amulets, museum collections, household religion and the concept of sin, children’s magical protection, religion mirrored in twenty-first dynasty personal correspondence, Esna, the group-statue of Pendua and Nefertari Kushite architectural programmes, the settlement at Tell Nabasha, the Saite-Persian cemetery at Abusir, project presentation and aegyptiaca in Portugal. Many of the issues were discussed during the Eighth European Conference of Egyptologists. Egypt 2017: Research Perspectives that was hosted by the New University of Lisbon and collaborator institutions in Portugal. The series of European meetings of Egyptologists was initiated in Warsaw in 1999. The Second and Third symposia were also held in Warsaw in 2001 and 2004, and the Fourth conference was organised in Budapest in 2006. The Fifth Conference was organised in Pułtusk in 2009, and the Sixth in Cracow, and the Seventh in Zagreb. The book is edited in co-operation by M.H. Trindade Lopes, J. Popielska-Grzybowska, J. Iwaszczuk and R.G. Gurgel Pereira.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to invite all scholars with interest in Ancient Egyptian archaeology, culture, history and language to participate in the CECE8 - VIIIth European Conference of Egyptologists. Egypt 2017: Perspectives of Research. The conference will be held in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (26th and 27th June), at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (29th June) and in the National Archaeology Museum (30th June). It is co-organised by the group Antiquity and Its Reception of CHAM (FCSH/NOVA-UAc, Professor Maria Helena Trindade Lopes) and the Department of Ancient Cultures of the Pułtusk Academy of Humanities in Pułtusk, Poland (Professor Joanna Popielska-Grzybowska).

It is a pleasure and an honor to offer these observations and reflections on the Nachlass and reception of ancient Egyptian culture to my friend, colleague, and fellow student Edward L. Bleiberg, whose fascination with the continuing survival and influence of ancient Egypt over the centuries and millennia I share.

African Studies Review, 2005