Bookshelf
Charlotte Booth, In Bed with the Ancient Egyptians Amberley, 2015 ISBN 978 1 445 64343 4 Price: £16.50
Compar ed wi th other ancient civilizations such as Greece and Rome, sexuality only became a topic for specialized monographs in Egyptological literature fairly recently: Manniche (1997 [1987]); Montserrat on Graeco-Roman Egypt (1996); Graves-Brown (ed. 2008): all cited in the present work. To this should be added Omlin on the Turin erotic papyrus (1973); Mysliwiec (1998 / Engl. 2004); and Schumann Antelme (1999 / Engl. 2001). In Bed with the Ancient Egyptians may be seen as a timely update of Manniche, with ample use of the literature, including scholarly articles that appeared in the intervening nearly 30 years. It covers ‘Idealized Beauty’; ‘Love and Marriage’; ‘Sex and the Pharaohs’; ‘Childbirth’; ‘Homosexuality’; ‘Prostitution’; ‘Sex and Medicine’; ‘Sex and Religion’; and ‘Sex in the Afterlife’. We are thus
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presented with aspects of the intimate lives of Egyptians of various social strata based on what they left in writing, on archaeological remains, including mummies, and, to some extent, artistic expr ession, all grouped under conventional headings familiar to our own way of thinking. As it is the case with much of our heritage from ancient Egypt, many of these sources are open to more than one interpretation. The Eg yptians them-selves were accustomed to coping with what has aptly been termed a ‘multiplicity of approaches’ to various issues, and, when applied to the expositions of Egyptologists, this state of affairs should equally not be considered a dilemma, but an enrichment. The book reads easily and covers a fair amount of what there is to know, considering the ambiguities of many texts and the uneven distribution in time of the sources. Only literature in English is quoted, thus omitting important contributions from French and German scholars, and the bulk of the notes, including those to translated texts, are to secondary sources. In view of the fact that these biblio-graphical references take up all of 30 pages, a separate, additional biblio-graphy would have facilitated the task of identifying them at a glance. A selection of illustrations, bound in the middle of the book, and some with erroneous captions, seems a bit like an afterthought, as they do not interact well with the text. With greater variety and adequate references they would have made the book a good deal more appealing to the general educated reader for whom it appears to be primarily intended. This being said, the book does provide a useful up-to-date introduction for those in quest of a general picture of sexual life among the ancient Egyptians. LISE MANNICHE
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