Ancient Egypt Letters 153
Your opportunity to comment on articles in the magazine or on any Egyptological subject that interests you. Email the Editor peter@ancientegyptmagazine.com with your thoughts.
philology
Reading the Herculaneum scrolls
Efforts to decipher the Herculaneum scrolls have reached an important turning point. The collection of over one thousand papyrus scrolls, carbonised during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, was discovered in 1752 in what is now known as…
Hieroglyphs: the key to ancient Egypt
As the British Museum marks the 200th anniversary of the decoding of the Rosetta Stone in a new exhibition, Lindsay Fulcher talks to its curator, Ilona Regulski, about the two men who worked to decipher its text, what it revealed, and the powerful role of the scribes who created these petrified books.
John Wesley Gilbert (1863-1923)
Gilbert was one of the first Americans – of any ethnicity – to undertake archaeological work in Greece. There, he is likely to have met Heinrich Schliemann, rediscoverer of Troy, and certainly he did groundbreaking excavation work on the neighbourhoods of Athens
Johannes Østrup’s journey of discovery: exploring the value of centuries-old scientific records
Dig into archive records. Leaf through forgotten research in books that were written in foreign tongues. Centuries-old observations can provide important perspectives on the archaeological record, as Eva Mortensen and Rubina Raja highlight in this account of a pioneering Danish explorer in the Syrian Desert.
The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts
Review by Andrew Robinson. All academics would presumably regard writing as one of the world’s great inventions, perhaps even the greatest invention. Philologist Silvia Ferrara certainly does. An expert on the undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script, she is the founder of a…
Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing
A leading handbook of scripts and writing that runs to almost a thousand pages, The World’s Writing Systems (1996), edited by Peter Daniels and William Bright, contains scarcely any reference to the Aztec writing system of Mesoamerica. Wikipedia’s entry on…