Cover Story
The piety of Ramesses III: Personal religion in ancient Egypt Diana Liesegang shows us a lesser-known side to the great warrior king of the Twentieth Dynasty. Features
From fragment to scene: The reliefs from the funerary complex of Mentuhotep II Maarten Praet is on a mission to track down and document the few surviving painted fragments that once adorned the innovative Middle Kingdom temple at Deir el-Bahri. 
The Shasu and Egypt Sean Rigby explores textual evidence to identify ancient Egypt’s enigmatic neighbour. 
Hilary Wilson on… Egypt and what to see in 1912 In our last issue, Hilary described what it was like to visit Egypt just before the First World War, based on a 1911-1912 tourist guide by A O Lamplough. Now… 
The American Petrie: George Reisner Julian Heath pays tribute to one the world’s greatest Egyptologists. 
Ani’s life after death – 1: Hymn to Ra and Osiris Andrew Fulton begins a new series exploring specific vignettes from Ani’s Book of the Dead. 
The Egyptian collection in Marseille Simone Petacchi visits the galleries of the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology (MAM), which houses the second largest collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts in France. News
New tombs at Tell el-Deir Sixty-three burials dating to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty have been discovered by the Egyptian mission working at Tell el-Deir cemetery in New Damietta. Inside the simple graves and mud-brick tombs, the… 
The screaming mummy The mummy of a woman with a screaming facial expression (below) has attracted a great deal of press attention recently, with headlines suggesting she died in agony. However, in spite… 
Hydraulic lift? Another news item that has had widespread coverage is the claim that the Step Pyramid of Djoser was built using a hydraulic lift. Research by a privately owned French institute… 
Roman catacomb discovery Two Roman Period rock-cut catacombs have been discovered by an Egyptian mission excavating at the site of Zawyet Umm el-Rakham, west of Marsa Matruh (about 300 km west of Alexandria).… 
Underwater inscriptions A French-Egyptian team has begun documenting rock carvings and inscriptions south of Aswan that were submerged when the area was flooded to create the Aswan High Dam in the 1970s.… 
Ancient astronomical observatory A structure, dating to the 6th century BC, discovered three years ago by an Egyptian mission at the Temple of Buto (in modern-day Tell el-Faraeen) is now thought to be… Views
The temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim Travel Geoffrey Lenox-Smith travels to Sinai to visit a temple dedicated to Hathor, ‘Lady of Turquoise’. 
Ancient Egypt October listings Museum, What's on EGYPT: JOURNEY TO IMMORTALITY An exhibition telling the story of the journey to the afterlife through 110 masterpieces from the Egyptian Museum of Florence (National Museum of Archaeology). Highlights include… 
Basin and ewer Objects Dr Campbell Price describes a small cleansing basin and ewer set from the Musée du Louvre. 
Discovery of the inscriptions of Khnumhotep III The Picture Desk Previously overlooked fragments dramatically change our knowledge of foreign contacts in the Middle Kingdom. 
Win a copy of The Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria by Andrew Michael Chugg or Pharaoh: art and power in ancient Egypt, edited by Marie Vandenbeusch Competitions What and where is this Christian monument? If you know, email the Editor (peter@ancientegyptmagazine.com) before 31 December with your answer, giving your full name, address and contact number. As this… Reviews
The temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim Geoffrey Lenox-Smith travels to Sinai to visit a temple dedicated to Hathor, ‘Lady of Turquoise’. Ancient Egypt October listings EGYPT: JOURNEY TO IMMORTALITY An exhibition telling the story of the journey to the afterlife through 110 masterpieces from the Egyptian Museum of Florence (National Museum of Archaeology). Highlights include… 
Pharaoh: art and power in ancient Egypt REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS This new British Museum publication explores the lives of the ancient Egyptians through objects held in the museum’s extensive Egyptology collection. Having first explained the basics… 
The Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria: Second Sun and Seventh Wonder of Antiquity (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) REVIEW BY SG The Pharos lighthouse was a feat of ancient engineering. For 16 centuries, its light guided ships through the hazardous rocks safely into Alexandria’s harbour, before finally toppling… 
A Journey through the Beyond: The Development of the Concept of Duat and Related Cosmological Notions in Egyptian Funerary Literature REVIEW BY ROGER FORSHAW In ancient Egypt, death was not regarded as the end of human existence, but rather as a transition to a new state of being in the… 
Through a glass darkly: Magic, dreams and prophecy in ancient Egypt REVIEW BY ANNA GARNETT Following a publishing trend of making classic and out-of-print texts available to a wide general audience, this latest reprint was first published in 2006 but is… 
From the editor
The memory of Ramesses II, ‘Ramesses the Great’, survived long after his death, and his namesake Ramesses III was clearly in awe of his ancestor’s reputation and legacy. He even named his children after (some of) Ramesses II’s many offspring. As Diana Liesegang tells us in her article, however, there were some major differences in the way religion was practised under Ramesses III compared with earlier periods. He may have been a warrior-king, but he was also keen to show himself as a pious ruler who bent to the will of the gods.
The process of advancing our knowledge of the ancient civilisation is sometimes like building a jigsaw with missing pieces and no picture of the result. Such is the case with attempts to determine the identity of the people (or is it the land?) recorded in ancient Egyptian texts as ‘Shasu’. Were they the original Israelites? Sean Rigby thinks not. A similar problem can exist with the interpretation of physical finds, such as the reliefs from the Temple of Mentuhotep at Deir el-Bahri that Maarten Praet is attempting to reconstruct from hundreds of fragments. Despite these problems, as Julian Heath tells us, there were (and are) Egyptologists whose perseverance and meticulous attention to detail reap astonishing rewards: the ‘American Petrie’, George Reisner, was one of them.
For those of our readers who are looking for a new adventure, our intrepid correspondent Geoffrey Lenox-Smith describes a visit to the Temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim, and, for those preferring something less strenuous, a visit to the Egyptology Museum at Marseille as described by Simone Petacchi sounds an attractive proposition. If you are reluctant to quit your armchair, however, Andrew Fulton’s analysis of the Book of the Dead of Ani might pass an hour or two.
Whether you choose to visit Egypt or a European museum, you are sure to spend less in real terms than visitors to Egypt in 1912. They would have seen some monuments familiar to us today, but many that have changed beyond all recognition, as Hilary Wilson reveals.
J Peter Phillips, Editor
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