Book Review: Klemm, R. and Klemm, D. D., Stones and Quarries in Ancient Egypt, British Museum Press 2008
Abstract. Rosemarie and Dietrich Klemm’s Stones and Quarries in Ancient Egypt, is described by W.D. Davies in the preface to the British Museum Edition as “one of modern Egyptology’s most valuable works of reference”. Stones and Quarries is an outstanding work of reference, but it wants to be much more. It contains a comprehensive gazetteer of quarries, whose primary use would be in the field. Its instructional content is designed, according to the authors, to raise standards of geological literacy among “all Egyptologists,” and to encourage interdisciplinary research. Looking at Stones and Quarries as, at the same time, a reference book, a field manual and a textbook of Egyptian petrology provokes two sets of questions. The one concerns the role of geology in Egyptology. Who should learn geology, for what purpose, and to what levels of expertise? The other concerns the future of conventional reference books in an age of electronic media. [more…]
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Review: Study Day. Ancient Egypt – Myth and History with John Romer
John Romer delivered an ambitious set of lectures that looked at the history of Egyptology, with a view to understanding how ideas about the past first developed in the nineteenth century have influenced how Egyptology is researched and understood today. [more…]
Topos and Mimesis – Ancient Egyptian perceptions of Ethnicity.
Introduction. Two recent books have included papers dealing with the topic of Ancient Egyptian perceptions of ethnicity: Schneider, T. 2010, Foreigners in Egypt: Archaeological Evidence and Cultural Context (in Wendrich 2010, p. 143-164) and Smith, S. T., 2007, Ethnicity and Culture (in Wilkinson 2007, p. 218-241). Both authors address the latest anthropological and archaeological literature on ethnicity and both use excavated frontier settlements as case studies. [more…]