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.
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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 temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim
Geoffrey Lenox-Smith travels to Sinai to visit a temple dedicated to Hathor, ‘Lady of Turquoise’.
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 she uses archive photos to illustrate how the monuments have changed since Lamplough’s book was published.
The American Petrie: George Reisner
Julian Heath pays tribute to one the world’s greatest Egyptologists.
Ancient Egypt Letters 145
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
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 the mummy and sarcophagus of Padimut, a ‘pseudo-mummy’ of a…
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.
Basin and ewer
Dr Campbell Price describes a small cleansing basin and ewer set from the Musée du Louvre.
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.
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 team found fragments of gold, amulets, and shabtis, as well…
Discovery of the inscriptions of Khnumhotep III
Previously overlooked fragments dramatically change our knowledge of foreign contacts in the Middle Kingdom.
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 after a series of earthquakes in the early 14th century…
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
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 is the Christmas issue, we will pick two lucky readers…
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 (geography, the dynasty system, historical evidence, and the role of…
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 now available in paperback for the first time. There are…
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 afterlife. This scholarly but readable volume explores the evolution over…
Ancient Egypt news in brief
•A 98-line papyrus text discovered at Gerza (ancient Philadelphia) in the Fayum has been deciphered by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, and found to contain fragments of two lost tragedies written by the Greek playwright Euripides. •A poorly…
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 of a recent examination using advanced scanning techniques, the cause…
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 specialising in hydrology, archaeology, and geotechnics suggests that the ancient…
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). The tombs are approached through a stairway leading to a…
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. Working in the area between the dam and the reservoir,…
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 Egypt’s first and largest astronomical observatory, where priests could monitor…