Ani’s life after death – 2: Mummification and Burial
Andrew Fulton continues his series exploring specific vignettes from Ani’s Book of the Dead.
Ancient Egypt
The First Egyptologists
Alan Lloyd considers the motives of certain individuals from antiquity for studying ancient Egypt. Were they Egyptologists?
Hilary Wilson on… Earrings
For this issue, Hilary turns her attention to one form of jewellery worn by both women and men in ancient Egypt.
Ancestral bust of a woman
Dr Campbell Price describes an unusual statue bust from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Ancient Egypt December listings
BETWEEN PRAGUE AND CAIRO: 100 YEARS OF CZECH EGYPTOLOGY A century of Czech archaeology in Egypt and Sudan is celebrated in a new exhibition presenting the work of the Czech Institute of Egyptology of Charles University, featuring in particular the…
Current Research in Egyptology 2022: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Symposium, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, 26-30 September 2022
REVIEW BY ROGER FORSHAW The 22nd Current Research in Egyptology (CRE) conference in Montpellier hosted around 250 attendees in person and online from different institutions around the world, and covered a great variety of topics with a wide chronological and…
The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra
REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS This latest narrative by Toby Wilkinson is written in his usual engaging style, drawing on the usual Greek and Roman sources, but also some 50 archives of papyri unearthed in Egypt. The three centuries between Alexander…
Tourism in Egypt through the ages: A historical guide
REVIEW BY CATHIE BRYAN Tourism in Egypt currently supports a profitable industry that was consolidated in the 19th century, when package tours were first introduced. The author’s objective is to trace the history of tourism from pharaonic times, arguing that…
Addressing Diversity: Inclusive Histories of Egyptology
REVIEW BY ANNA GARNETT Egyptology is constantly being redefined and reinterpreted to recognise more inclusive histories, helping to recentre traditional narratives. This fascinating volume brings together a range of international perspectives on these ‘supporting characters’ of Egyptology over the past…
Motherhood and Early Childhood in Ancient Egypt: Culture, Religion and Medicine
REVIEW BY HILARY WILSON Amandine Marshall’s book, originally published in French in 2015, is a companion to her Childhood in Ancient Egypt (AUC, 2022). In the foreword to this English-language edition, Salima Ikram suggests that, despite limited source material, Marshall’s…
Athribis pylon
A joint German–Egyptian team excavating the western side of the Great Temple of Athribis (Sohag) has uncovered the remains of a temple pylon. Measuring 51 metres in length, the pylon would have been about 18 metres tall – similar in…
Berenike discoveries
An Egyptian mission has discovered a military fort at Tell el-Abqain (Beheira Governorate), in the north-west Delta. The fort was a key military outpost on the western military road, an area prone to attack by Libyan tribes, and later the…
Ancient mirrors
New research from the University of Liverpool (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, October 2024) has given insights into how ancient Egyptian mirrors were manufactured. Metallurgical analysis on 19 Egyptian mirrors from UK museum collections shows three main types of alloy…
Ancient metal contamination
Evidence for the world’s first case of metal contamination has been discovered in the sediments of an ancient harbour at Giza. The harbour, close to the Great Pyramid of Khufu, was located on a now defunct branch of the Nile,…
Restoration at Edfu and Esna
The original colours of scenes inside the Temple of Edfu are now visible following cleaning and restoration work by a team from the University of Würzburg and the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The team removed the surface dirt, bird debris,…
Middle Kingdom finds
Intact burials containing a collection of beautiful jewellery have been discovered by the joint Egyptian-American South Asasif Conservation Project in a tomb located near the Twenty-fifth Dynasty Tomb of Karabasken (TT391). This is the first Middle Kingdom burial to be…
Ancient Egypt news in brief
• Deliberately deformed sheep horns have been found in a burial at Hierakonpolis: the mutilation may have been to prevent the animals from injuring each other and their human handlers. • New research from Johns Hopkins University in the USA…
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.
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…