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Picture this: A group of small schoolchildren is taken to a
Natural History Museum. The cases are filled with brown, beige and
burnished ochre chips of pottery, stone tools, unpainted and
oddly-proportioned statues from ancient civilizations. Instead of
making the textbook material spring to life in the children's
imaginations, the artefacts seem only to render the extinct
societies more distant, strange and colorless. Then, the group
rounds a corner into the Egyptian galleries, which are filled with
wall-fragments, stelae and coffins still resplendent in the vivid
red, green, azure and brown of the original paint. Tiny,
fascinating, child-sized pictures cover everything. The teacher or
guide tells the kids that these aren't just pictures, they're the
writing of an ancient language. Not only that, but this writing
encodes "Magical spells", "Protective Curses", "Tales of the Gods"
and "Prayers for the Dead". Oooooooooooooh. A fascination is
born.
I'm not exactly sure when or how many times this scenario
happened for me, but that "ooh" stage is something I never outgrew.
Something about the balance between clean, simple-lined aesthetics
of Old Kingdom greywacke statues and the gaudy brilliance of color
and design in jewelry, hieroglyphs and tomb decoration holds my
fascination and excites new wonder. The summer I was fourteen, I
decided to try to teach myself to read hieroglyphs. Not being a
genius of the Champollion cut, I was not exactly successful, but I
made some headway, and I continued to research various aspects of
Ancient Egypt privately until I was able to take advantage of some
of the resources at the Oriental Institute here and obtain more
formal training.
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The specifications for a book's membership in my collection are
somewhat broad, though they have narrowed over time, and I am
continually weeding out various books. Most simply, books must have
Ancient Egypt or some aspect of its study as their central focus. I
am picky about books' scholarship, and generally avoid volumes
whose data is outdated, ill-researched or oversimplified, though I
keep some classics with historiographic significance, such as E.A.
Wallis Budge's Victorian-era tour-guide, the reproduction of
Champollion's monograph Lettre à M. Dacier, and Gardiner's
Egyptian Grammar. I am far from wealthy enough to pursue
first-editions of these historiographic works; with the exception
of the limited-edition exhibition guide to the Treasures of
Tutankhamun collection which toured the States in 1976, these
volumes are all reproductions, reprints and modern editions. Within
the realm of modern scholarship, I look for well-researched and
-written works which either present well-orchestrated overviews of
Ancient Egypt as an integrated whole, or focus on particularly
interesting and important aspects of Ancient Egyptian culture,
periods of history or research methods. Baines and Málek's
Atlas of Ancient Egypt, for example, is a valuable topography-based
reference, while Partridge's Faces of Pharaohs explores Ancient
Egyptian dynastic structure and history via modern analysis of
mummified human remains. My collection of Egypt-related fiction is
fast branching off into a separate collection, but I think it is a
valuable exploration of the imaginative, romantic aspects of
reconstructing a distantly removed past, so I have included here
one title from the fiction sub-group.In the future, I would like to
include more primary-source material, more books of historiographic
interest in the field, and a better representation of Old Kingdom
and early Middle Kingdom materials. In particular, I lust after
James Henry Breasted's nineteenth-century Egyptian history, and
there is a very pretty translation of Letters to the Dead which I
want for my own. There is no shortage of books on the market about
my object of obsession, which is very unfortunate for my wallet,
which is too thin, and for my bookshelves, which are prematurely
bent like osteoporotic women. I, however, am quite happy to nestle
in my wealth and read on.
Ms. Dion won the 4th-year prize in 2002
for the
collection described in the preceding essay.
A sample of her
bibliography follows.
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General Titles
(sample out of 12 titles)
Baines, John and Málek, Jaromir.
Atlas of Ancient Egypt. Andromeda Oxford Limited:
Abingdon, U.K.,1980.
-
Hardback, excellent
condition
-
This is a really great atlas and
basic reference. It not only aligns the ancient and modern
topography but also provides articles on history, culture,
geography and geology along with lists of Ancient Egyptian, modern
English and Arabic topographic vocabulary and place-names.
Primary Source
Material
(or as close as one can come to primary source texts
after 2000--5000 years)
(sample out of 9 titles)
Description de l'Égypte, ou
Recueil des Observations et des Recherches qui ont été
Faites en Égypte Pendant l'Expédition de l'Armée
Française, Publié sous les Orders de Napoléon
Bonaparte. Bibliothèque de l'Image: Tours, France,
1998.
- Hardback, jacket somewhat shredded along spine where it rubbed
against something else in my suitcase, but otherwise in excellent
condition ·
- A prize of the first magnitude, this book was a gift I bought
myself when I was in Paris this past summer. It is a new,
one-volume reprint of the original encyclopedic opus intended to
catalogue Napoleon's grand new territory-were he to have
successfully conquered Egypt, which he didn't exactly do. The book
is important not only from a historiographic standpoint, but
because Napoleon's team of artists and scientists meticulously
recorded features of sites and artefacts which unfortunately did
not survive later "archaeologists", scavengers, tourists and black
market profiteers. Although this expedition and the paperwork it
generated were seminal in the later decryption of hieroglyphic
writing and the Egyptian language, none of the artists contributing
to this volume had any real idea of what the inscriptions they saw
said. Nonetheless, these men so accurately copied what they saw
that Description de l'Égypte has legibly preserved
huge inscriptions now otherwise lost. The artistry alone makes this
volume invaluable.
Brunner, Hellmut. Hieroglyphische
Chrestomathie: v.2, Verbesserte Auflage. Otto
Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, Germany, 1992.
- Paper-back, excellent condition
- This is a collection of photographs of surviving Egyptian
hieratic (cursive hieroglyphic) texts. The photographs are clear
enough for the modern translator to read, allowing one to truly go
back to the written primary source material as much as possible
without actually tracking down these stelae and yanking them out of
their museum cases.
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian
Literature: Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. University
of California Press, Ltd. : Berkley, 1975.
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian
Literature: Volume II: The New Kingdom.University of
California Press: Berkley, 1976.
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian
Literature: Volume III: The Late Period. University of
California Press: Berkley, 1980.
- Paperback, excellent condition
- Lichtheim's comparatively recent and extremely scholarly set of
books are comprised of the translation of a variety of historically
and culturally important Egyptian texts throughout the span of the
classically considered Ancient Egyptian state. These texts range
from religious funerary texts to tomb biographies of prominent
figures, medical papyri and records of international diplomacy,
trade and conquest.
Petrie, W.M. Flinders ed. Egyptian
Tales: Translated from the Papyri. Dover Publications, Inc. :
Mineola,1999. (unabridged republication of the two-volume 1895
translations)
- Paperback, slightly worn corners but very good
condition
- Petrie was the first truly rigorous excavator and archaeologist
to explore Egypt ; to the present, he remains one of the best,
brightest, most innovative and fascinating Egyptologists of any
period. This popular volume contains translations of a variety of
more plot-oriented texts spanning the Old Kingdom-Late Period. The
translations are accurate, yet accessible, and each tale is
followed by a brief discussion of the text, its provenance and
possible interpretations. It's both a fun read and extraordinarily
informative.
The Egyptian
Language
(sample out of 9 titles)
Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian: An
Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs.
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
- Paperback, creased spine, much-fingered and worn pages
Champollion, Jean-François et
Guyon, Jean-Claude. Lettre à M. Dacer, Secrétaire
Perpétuel de l'Académie Royale Des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres, Relative à l'Alphabet des Hiéroglyphes
Phonétiques Employés par les Égyptiens pour Inscrire
leurs Monuments les Tîtres, les Noms et les Surnoms des
Souverains Grecs et Romains (Suivie de La Bataille des
Hiéroglyphes). Fata Morgana : Frontfroide, France, 1989.
Reproduction of the original Lettre à M. Dacier…,
(published without the postlude by Guyon) Bibliothèque
Artistique et Littéraire: Frontfroide, France, 1822.
- Paper-bound with combed pages, excellent condition
- Lettre à M. Dacer qualifies as one of my treasures. This
volume is a beautiful reproduction of Champollion's 1822 letter to
the Secretary of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and
Belles-Lettres after he decoded the Rosetta Stone. The scholarship
is obviously somewhat outdated, but as the modern postlude outlines
in greater detail for modern readers, the historiographic
significance of the work is overwhelming, and its influences on any
modern studies within Egyptology are far-reaching. My boss picked
this up for me as a gift when she visited the Louvre three years
ago.
Specific Themes,
Periods and Perspectives within Egyptology
(sample out of 19 titles)
Aldred, Cyril. Akhenaten: King of
Egypt. Thames and Hudson, Ltd.: London, U.K., 1988.
- Paperback, somewhat creased spine, highlighting on some
pages
Capel, Anne K. and Markoe, Glenn E.
eds. Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in
Ancient Egypt. Hudson Hills Press, New York in Association
with Cincinnati Art Museum : New York, 1996.
- Hardback, excellent condition with beautiful illustrations
Germond, Philippe. An Egyptian
Bestiary: Animals in Life and Religion in the Land of the
Pharaohs. Trans. Barbara Mellor. Thames and Hudson: London,
U.K., 2001.
- Hardback, excellent condition
Partridge, Robert B. Faces of
Pharaohs: Royal Mummies and Coffins from Ancient Thebes. The
Rubicon Press: London, U.K., 1994.
- Paperback, excellent condition, black and white photographs of
mummies interspersed on non-glossy pages
- This book was written by a physician who examined the Deir
el-Bahri mummy cache via modern radiographic techniques. The
degrees of probable blood-relatedness between members of the royal
family, mis-identification of mummies by later generations,
illnesses and probable causes of death are all discussed at
length.
Quirke, Stephen. Ancient Egyptian
Religion. Dover Publications, Inc.: New York, 1992.
Historiographically Important
Materials
Budge, E.A. Wallis. Budge's Egypt:
A Classic 19th-Century Travel Guide. General Publishing
Company, Ltd.: Toronto, Canada, 2001.
Budge, E.A. Wallis. The Nile: Notes for Travellers in
Egypt. Thos. Cook & Son: London, England,1890.
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Paperback, excellent condition,
inscription on title page
-
Budge was the unscrupulous Collector
of Antiquities for the British Museum during the Victorian era. At
one point, the colonial authorities in Egypt, both British and
French, grew so weary of Budge's complicity in the illegal
antiquities market that the French Director of Antiquities for
Egypt forbade this robber-archaeologist to leave the country with
any more antiquities. The Director of Antiquities then sent a large
group of gendarmes to Budge's hotel to make sure the British Museum
employee boarded his ship within the week without any artefacts.
Budge distracted the police officers with a large meal while his
henchmen dug a tunnel through the hotel's basement wall and
smuggled antiques to the ship through this tunnel. This travel
guide is typical of Budge's popular works on the antiquities of
Egypt; it is engaging, riddled with inaccuracies and extremely
colonialist in perspective. The book provides an interesting view
into the Victorian understanding of Egypt, which, for ill or for
good, continues to influence scholarship today.
Gilbert, Katharine Stoddert Gilbert, Joan K. Holt and Sara
Hudson eds. Treasures of Tutankhamun. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art: New York, 1976.
-
Paperback, good condition, faded
spine
-
One of my prizes is this volume, one
of a limited-edition run printed for the unique 1976 tour of
Tutankhamun's funerary goods through major American cities. The
book catalogues the entire collection in detail, contains articles
on Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb and Tutankhamun himself as
well as a large quantity of color photos. A friend of mine obtained
this book from a huge used-book sale for $3 and gave it to
me.
Fiction
(sample out of 19 books)
Peters, Elizabeth. Three Complete
Amelia Peabody Mysteries : Crocodile on the Sandbank, The Curse of
the Pharaohs, The Mummy Case. Barnes and Noble Books : New
York, 1993 (compilation © ; 1975, 1981, 1985 original
publications).
- Hardback, worn jacket, pages slightly grubby on the edges,
binding slightly loose, overall good condition
- A Ph.D. alumna of the U. of C.'s Oriental Institute Egyptology
program, Barbara Mertz has written two popular volumes on
Egyptology in addition to a large corpus of mystery novels under
her pen name Elizabeth Peters. The Amelia Peabody mysteries are set
in the Victorian period with a husband-wife Egyptologist duo who
solve mysteries. It's candy for the egyptophile, and surprizingly
well-researched.
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