Covering the time span from the Paleolithic period to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., the eminent Egyptologist Donald Redford explores three thousand years of uninterrupted contact between Egypt and Western Asia across the Sinai land-bridge. In the vivid and lucid style that we expect from the author of the popular Akhenaten, Redford presents a sweeping narrative of the love-hate relationship between the peoples of ancient Israel/Palestine and Egypt.

Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times

History

Redford, Donald B.

Ancient Civilizations

Princeton University Press

Here is a striking portrait of Akhenaten, monotheistic worshiper of the sun and best-known Egyptian king next to Tutankhamen. Various writers have depicted this strange ruler of the fourteenth century B.C. as a disguised woman or a eunuch, a mentor of Moses, or a forerunner of Christ. Drawing on a vast amount of new evidence from his own excavations, the Director of the Akhenaten Temple Project describes the kingly heretic against the background of imperial Egypt. Donald Redford's work, available for the first time in paperback, shows Akhenaten to be even more fascinating in this context than in earlier, less realistic interpretations.

Akhenaten: The Heretic King

Middle East

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

In this richly illustrated book, renowned archaeologist Donald Redford draws on the latest discoveries--including many of his own--to tell the story of the ancient Egyptian city of Mendes, home of the mysterious cult of the "fornicating ram who mounts the beauties." Excavation by Redford and his colleagues over the past two decades has cast a flood of light on this strange center of worship and political power located in the Nile Delta. A sweeping chronological account filled with photographs, drawings, and informative sidebars, City of the Ram-Man is the first history of Mendes written for general readers.
 Founded in the remote prehistoric past, inhabited continuously for 5,000 years, and abandoned only in the first-century BC, Mendes is a microcosm of ancient Egyptian history. City of the Ram-Man tells the city's full story--from its founding, through its development of a great society and its brief period as the capital of Egypt, up to its final decline. Central to the story is millennia of worship dedicated to the lascivious ram-god. The book describes the discoveries of the great temple of the ram and the "Mansion of the Rams," where the embalmed bodies of the avatars of the god were buried. It also discusses ancient Greek reports that these ram-gods occasionally ritually fornicated with women.
 Vividly written and informed throughout by Redford's intimate knowledge of the remains of Mendes, City of the Ram-Man is a unique account of a long-lost monument of Egyptian history, religion, and culture.

City of the Ram-Man: The Story of Ancient Mendes

Americas

A HISTORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT: EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION IN CONTEXT

Kendall/Hunt Publishing

From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
In From Slave to Pharaoh, noted Egyptologist Donald B. Redford examines over two millennia of complex social and cultural interactions between Egypt and the Nubian and Sudanese civilizations that lay to the south of Egypt. These interactions resulted in the expulsion of the black Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in 671 B.C. by an invading Assyrian army.
Redford traces the development of Egyptian perceptions of race as their dominance over the darker-skinned peoples of Nubia and the Sudan grew, exploring the cultural construction of spatial and spiritual boundaries between Egypt and other African peoples. Redford focuses on the role of racial identity in the formulation of imperial power in Egypt and the legitimization of its sphere of influence, and he highlights the dichotomy between the Egyptians' treatment of the black Africans it deemed enemies and of those living within Egyptian society. He also describes the range of responses―from resistance to assimilation―of subjugated Nubians and Sudanese to their loss of self-determination. Indeed, by the time of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, the culture of the Kushite kings who conquered Egypt in the late eighth century B.C. was thoroughly Egyptian itself.
Moving beyond recent debates between Afrocentrists and their critics over the racial characteristics of Egyptian civilization, From Slave to Pharaoh reveals the true complexity of race, identity, and power in Egypt as documented through surviving texts and artifacts, while at the same time providing a compelling account of war, conquest, and culture in the ancient world.

Africa

Johns Hopkins University Press

The Akhenaten Temple Project, Vol. 1

Smith, R. W.

Aris & Phillips

No development has had a greater effect on human history than the introduction of domesticated plants and animals. Although the inception of domesticates and agriculture rose independently in several regions of the world, the Near East has been considered the cradle of early agriculture and Egypt the site of the earliest great civilisation to use it. This volume explores the development and extent of Egyptian agriculture and the various domestic species used. Illustrated with wall paintings and reliefs that give abundant evidence of the ways in which the Egyptians used plants and animals daily life.

Domestic Plants and Animals: The Ancient Egyptian Origins

Brewer, Douglas J.

Redford, Susan

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

Books by Redford, Donald B.