Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids

International experts examine the history of the Old Kingdom, the architecture of royal pyramid complexes and nonroyal tombs, statuary, reliefs, minor arts, and the history of evacuations of Old Kingdom monuments.

Arts & Photography

Allen, James P.

Allen et al., James P.

History & Criticism

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This book presents a new study of the important Middle Kingdom papyri of Heqanakht. Featured scholarship includes microscopic and computer examination data, previously unpublished excavation archives from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photographs, facsimiles, and hieroglyphic transcriptions of all eight preserved papyri and five inscribed fragments. Also included are never-before-seen photographs of the tomb in which the papyri were found; translations and textual commentary; epigraphic and linguistic analysis; and studies of the people, places, archeological context and chronology of the papyri. The accompanying CD contains enlargeable full-color images of all the papyri in Adobe Acrobat format, usable in both PC and Mac format, along with the Acrobat Reader program needed to view them.

The Heqanakht Papyri: Publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Egyptian Expedition, 27 (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

This volume documents twenty-six monumental tombs of the ancient Egyptian Twelfth Dynasty that were excavated by the Metropolitan Museum Egyptian Expedition from 1906 to 1934 and 1984 to 1991. Focusing on the study and reconstruction of the architecture of the tombs, the book also publishes remains of reliefs and inscriptions that decorated the walls. The author demonstrates the astonishing variety of Middle Kingdom funeral architecture. Whereas some of the Lisht structures relate closely to Old Kingdom mastabas, there is also a new group of freestanding chapels that are derived from contemporary deity temples and foreshadow the temple-tombs of later periods in Egyptian history. Also included is an appendix by James P. Allen on the biographical inscription in one of the tombs

Middle Kingdom Tomb Architecture at Lisht (Egyptian Expedition Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Arnold, Dieter

Ancient Egypt continues to exert a real fascination for the public, as attested by the unfailing success of the major exhibitions devoted to the subject. One of the notable qualities of the exhibition and publication Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, the first to be devoted entirely to the approximately five centuries of the Old Kingdom, is that they restores our temporal perspective. In doing so, the exhibition and publication demonstrate the extraordinary flowering of the arts at the time the pyramids were built, when not only architecture, but also sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts were at their peak. The show and book allow us to reunite works of the same provenance that have been dispersed throughout the world by the vicissitudes of acquisition. In addition to offering enormous aesthetic pleasure, the reassembling of these works has great art-historical value: for a brief period of time, it gives us the opportunity to evaluate, on the basis of the objects themselves, the attribution of certain dates and the pertinence of certain hypothesis. In this way, the exhibition and publication acquaints the public with the exciting scholarly reevaluation of this formative phase of Egyptian art that has taken place internationally during the 1990s. Over the course of the roughly five-hundred-year duration of the Old Kingdom, Egyptians not only created the pyramids, the world's most abstract building form; on the basis of initiatives originating in the Archaic Period, they also once and for all defined the essence of their art. Centering their attention on the human image but depicting animals, plants, landscapes, and inanimate objects as well, Old Kingdom artists used stone as their primary medium. This was a material whose durability best served the culture's all-encompassing goal of defeating death, by preserving life in the form of statues and reliefs created for tombs. Distilling the multiplicity of existence, artists created a limited number of standard types and a canon of circumscribed formal concepts that was flexible enough to allow the depiction of life's diversity through subtle variation and an infusion of innumerable realistic details. Keen observation of nature through understanding of the functioning of both human and animal bodies led to the invention of images of an organic truthfulness unparalleled at the time. The catalogue includes fifteen essays by experts in the Egyptian art field, spanning subjects such as history, royal architecture and sculpture, and nonroyal statuary. The volume also includes maps, an extensive chronology, a glossary, and a complete bibliography. [This book was originally published in 1999 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt

During a brief seventeen-year reign (ca. 1353–1336 B.C.) the pharaoh Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, founder of the world's first known monotheistic religion, devoted his life and the resources of his kingdom to the worship of the Aten (a deity symbolized by the sun disk) and thus profoundly affected history and the history of art. The move to a new capital, Akhetaten/Amarna, brought essential changes in the depictions of royal women. It was in their female imagery, above all, that the artists of Amarna departed from the traditional iconic representations to emphasize the individual, the natural, in a way unprecedented in Egyptian art.
A picture of exceptional intimacy emerges from the sculptures and reliefs of the Amarna Period. Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti, and their six daughters are seen in emotional interdependence even as they participate in cult rituals. The female principle is emphasized in astonishing images: the aging Queen Mother Tiye, the mysterious Kiya, and Nefertiti, whose painted limestone bust in Berlin is the best-known work from ancient Egypt—perhaps from all antiquity.
The workshop of the sculptor Thutmose—one of the few artists of the period whose name is known to us—revealed a treasure trove when it was excavated in 1912. An entire creative process is traced through an examination of the work of Thutmose and his assistants, who lived in a highly structured environment. All was left behind when Amarna was abandoned after the death of Akhenaten and the return to religious orthodoxy.
Dorothea Arnold, then the Lila Acheson Wallace curator in charge of the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, has provided a landmark art-historical exploration of a period when the confluence of religion, art, and politics resulted in a unique epoch.
James P. Allen, then associate curator, Department of Egyptian Art, has elucidated this revolutionary era in the history of religion, a time when the governing principle of life was a "sole god, with no other except him," light itself.
In her brief biographical summaries, the Egyptologist L. Green of Scarborough College, the University of Toronto, places the royal women of Amarna in genealogical context. [This title was originally published in 1999.]

Arnold, Dorothea

Green, Lyn

Middle Egyptian introduces the reader to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It contains twenty-six lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary. It also includes a series of twenty-five essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion and literature. The combination of grammar lessons and cultural essays allows users to not only read hieroglyphic texts but also to understand them, providing readers with the foundation to understand texts on monuments and to read great works of ancient Egyptian literature in the original text. This second edition contains revised exercises and essays, providing an up to date account of current research and discoveries. New illustrations enhance discussions and examples. These additions combine with the previous edition to create a complete grammatical description of the classical language of ancient Egypt for specialists in linguistics and other fields.

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs

Cambridge University Press

Middle Egyptian introduces the reader to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It contains twenty-six lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary. It also includes a series of twenty-five essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion and literature. The combination of grammar lessons and cultural essays allows users to not only read hieroglyphic texts but also to understand them, providing readers with the foundation to understand texts on monuments and to read great works of ancient Egyptian literature in the original text. This second edition contains revised exercises and essays, providing an up to date account of current research and discoveries. New illustrations enhance discussions and examples. These additions combine with the previous edition to create a complete grammatical description of the classical language of ancient Egypt for specialists in linguistics and other fields.

History

Ancient Civilizations

This is an introduction to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It contains twenty-six lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary, as well as twenty-five essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion and literature. It also offers scholars of linguistics a complete grammatical description of the classical language of ancient Egypt.

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

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Books by Allen, James P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Allen, James P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids

The Heqanakht Papyri: Publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Egyptian Expedition, 27 (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

Middle Kingdom Tomb Architecture at Lisht (Egyptian Expedition Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids

The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs

Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs