EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Bookshelf
Barry Kemp Ancient Egypt:Anatomy of a Civilization.Routledge,2006.2nd edition (ISBN 0 415 23550 2). Price: £55 (hard back), £16.99 (paperback). This revised edition of Barry Kemp’s Ancient Egypt has been eagerly awaited by many Egyptologists (especially those of us who have shamelessly filched its insights and its distinctive line-drawings for our lectures), and I should state from the outset that it does not disappoint; this is not a cosmetic revision but one that significantly alters and improves the book. For those who are not familiar with its 1st edition (can that be true of any dedicated Egyptian Archaeology reader?) I should note that the book, as its title suggests, attempts to present, in one volume, the essence of Egyptian culture, and some indication of the ways in which it gradually emerged and evolved. The combination of archaeology and texts is similar to that employed to good effect in Trigger et al. Ancient Egypt: a social history, but in Kemp’s book the chapters are primarily thematic rather than historical (although the chapters deal with the material in a roughly chronological order). The main changes and additions in the revised edition can be summarised as a balance sheet. On the credit side there are two entirely new chapters (one comprising a study of the ancient Egyptians’identity,and another taking the form of a summary of cultural change from the end of the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic Period) and the injection, at numerous points throughout the text, of a great deal of the new archaeological data that has accumulated during the seventeen years that have elapsed since the first edition. Chapter 3 ‘The dynamics of culture’, for example, now incorporates discussion of the early religious material at Tell Ibrahim Awad. On the debit side, the long chapter on the archaeology of Amarna has gone (but of course it hasn’t really gone because it’s still there in the 1st edition, making the two editions now in effect complementary resources). Even with a missing chapter, more has been gained than lost, and the book is now about 80 pages longer, with an updated bibliography as well as text. In his new introduction the author discusses the aims of both editions. He manages to make it fairly clear that he was keen to add the anthropologically-oriented first chapter ‘Who were the ancient Egyptians?’ but that he essentially had to be persuaded to write the new final chapter‘Moving on’.It is to his credit, however, that the latter seems nevertheless to have been written with just as much enthusiasm and attention to detail as the former; and the decision to approach the Third Intermediate Period and Late Period through a series of case-studies seems to me to work very well. On a personal note (and I find it hard to be properly objective about a book I’ve always liked so much),one of the things that I particularly appreciated about the first edition was that it was written not in an overly academic style, but in such a way that the authentic voice of the author seemed often to be speaking, both
musing about some of the oddities of the culture or the data, and also talking to the reader in a very direct way. I have also always been impressed by its coherence as a work – even if you don’t agree with all of its underlying theories (whether pre-formal vs formal religion or the dominance of ‘control-freakery’ in Middle Kingdom material culture) the book has a flow and a momentum that make it highly persuasive as a total ‘manifesto’. In this 2nd edition my impression is that both of these assets are accentuated, making the new book even more distinctive than its predecessor. Ancient Egypt has quite rightly been the ideal book to recommend to serious Egyptological students, and in this new edition it will continue to occupy the same role. IAN SHAW Charlotte Booth, The Hyksos Period in Egypt. Shire Publications Ltd, 2005. (ISBN 0 7478 0638 1).Price:£5.99.Migration,ethnicity and questions of race are today popular subjects in all parts of society and so also in Egyptology, doubtless influenced by the challenges they present in modern times.The Hyksos Period is one of the darkest in Egyptian history and is concerned with all these subjects. People from Western Asia migrated into Northern Egypt and formed a mixed society within Egyptian borders, and perhaps even ruled greater parts of Egypt. In recent decades renewed research into different aspects of the period and the excavations at the Hyksos capital Avaris, modern Tell el-Daba, have yielded a rich corpus of new material for this period. However, there are still surprisingly many open questions remaining, and it is therefore much to be welcomed that this small book provides a general overview for readers unfamiliar with the research publications, many of which are not available in English. After a brief historical introduction, the author discusses in her second chapter the rise of the Hyksos, which seems to follow an influx of Canaanites into the eastern Delta, dramatically visible in an increase of Syro42
Palestinian pottery at Avaris at the end of the Middle Kingdom (after 1750 BC), and the rise of people with foreign names to important political positions and finally to the kingship. The third chapter is devoted to the settlements of the period, mainly the capital Avaris (Tell el-Daba). Fortifications and houses are discussed, and the growth of Avaris from an Egyptian town to a settlement for ever more people coming from Palestine is described. A good proportion of the chapter is devoted to a temple complex at Avaris with a mixture of building in Egyptian and Asiatic traditions. The fourth chapter deals entirely with the religion of the Hyksos. Contrary to later ancient Egyptian propaganda,the author shows that the Hyksos worshipped Egyptian gods, including the sun god Re. Their main deity was Seth, whom they perhaps identified with the Near Eastern god Baal. The chapter ends with an account of the un-Egyptian burial customs of the Hyksos, who placed their dead often inside the settlements, sometimes even within houses. In the next chapter, the contributions of the Hyksos to Egyptian culture are discussed, demonstrating that the period was an era when Egypt did not just suffer under foreign rule,but also received new ideas, including advanced weapon technology. The country was now opened up to contact with other civilisations. The author also notes finds abroad that suggest that Hyksos rulers were in contact with other Near Eastern or Mediterranean courts, such as those of the Hittites and Crete, and exchanged gifts. The final chapter discusses the Theban wars against the Hyksos and their expulsion under Ahmose at the beginning of the New Kingdom. The book is fully illustrated with colour photographs, and several line drawings by the author. As already stated the period is one of the darkest of Egyptian history and, beside the development of the material culture, there are few facts which can be considered certain.The author is aware of these problems but seems not to be in full control of her sources, sometimes mixing information (e.g. p.18 and p. 27 where a Middle Kingdom water channel is described as belonging to the Hyksos Period) and sometimes over-interpreting the few sources (e.g. p.49:‘The downfall of the Hyksos was probably a result of the personal ambition and greed of Apophis’). For a more authoritative view on the period the reader might better consult one of the author’s main sources, Manfred Bietak, The Capital of the Hyksos (London, 1996), or the more recent chapter by Janine Bourriau in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (ed. Ian Shaw), pp.184-217 (Oxford 2000). WOLFRAM GRAJETSKI Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt.Translated from the German by David Lorton, abridged and updated by the author, Cornell University Press, 2005. (ISBN 0 8014 4241 9). Price: £31.50. For two decades, translations have made life so much easier for the English-reader interested in ancient