Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the actual people who produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. While traditional research has focused on identifying a 'pure' or 'original' text behind the actual manuscripts that have come down to us from pre-modern Egypt, the volume looks instead at variation - different ways of saying the same thing - as a rich source for understanding the complex social and cultural environments in which scribes lived and worked, breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as 'free' or indicative of 'corruption'. As such, it presents a novel reconceptualization of scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural environments. Introducing to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, among others, the authors then apply them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format. After first presenting this conceptual framework, they demonstrate how it has been applied to better-studied pre-modern societies by drawing upon the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English, before proceeding to a series of case studies applying these concepts to scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from the languages and writing systems of Pharaonic times, to those of Late Antique and Islamic Egypt.

15 Egyptological and Papyrological papers investigate a great variety of issues, including social and religious aspects of life in ancient Egypt, ritual and magic, language and literature, ideology of death, demonology, the iconographical tradition, and intercultural relations, ranging chronologically from the Prehistoric to the Coptic period.

The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology offers a comprehensive survey of the entire study of ancient Egypt from prehistory through to the end of the Roman period. It seeks to place Egyptology within its theoretical, methodological, and historical contexts, indicating how the subject has evolved and discussing its distinctive contemporary problems, issues, and potential. Transcending conventional boundaries between archaeological and ancient textual analysis, the volume brings together 63 chapters that range widely across archaeological, philological, and cultural sub-disciplines, highlighting the extent to which Egyptology as a subject has diversified and stressing the need for it to seek multidisciplinary methods and broader collaborations if it is to remain contemporary and relevant. Organized into ten parts, it offers a comprehensive synthesis of the various sub-topics and specializations that make up the field as a whole, from the historical and geographical perspectives that have influenced its development and current characteristics, to aspects of museology and conservation, and from materials and technology - as evidenced in domestic architecture and religious and funerary items - to textual and iconographic approaches to Egyptian culture. Authoritative yet accessible, it serves not only as an invaluable reference work for scholars and students working within the discipline, but also as a gateway into Egyptology for classicists, archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists.

The present volume collects current research on manuscripts written in the demotic language, which have recently been discovered in excavations or which can be found in museums worldwide. The manuscripts’ topics range from religion, law, and literature through ancient Egyptian linguistics to the history of economics as well as social history. Featured articles were first presented at the International Conference for Demotic Studies in Leipzig.

During the period 500–1000 CE Egypt was successively part of the Byzantine, Persian and Islamic empires. All kinds of events, developments and processes occurred that would greatly affect its history and that of the eastern Mediterranean in general. This is the first volume to map Egypt's position in the Mediterranean during this period. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, the individual chapters detail its connections with imperial and scholarly centres, its role in cross-regional trade networks, and its participation in Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultural developments, including their impact on its own literary and material production. With unparalleled detail, the book tracks the mechanisms and structures through which Egypt connected politically, economically and culturally to the world surrounding it.

Manuscript cultures based on Arabic script feature various tendencies in standardisation of orthography, script types and layout. Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and provides a typological cross-cultural comparison of standardisation processes in twelve Arabic-influenced writing traditions where different cultures, languages and scripts interact. A wide range of case studies give insights into the factors behind uniformity and variation in Judeo-Arabic in Hebrew script, South Palestinian Christian Arabic, New Persian, Aljamiado of the Spanish Moriscos, Ottoman Turkish, a single multilingual Ottoman manuscript, Sino-Arabic in northwest China, Malay Jawi in the Moluccas, Kanuri and Hausa in Nigeria, Kabyle in Algeria, and Ethiopian Fidäl script as used to transliterate Arabic. One of the findings of this volume is that different domains of manuscript cultures have distinct paths of standardisation, so that orthography tends to develop its own standardisation principles irrespective of norms applied to layout and script types. This book will appeal to readers interested in manuscript studies, sociolinguistics, literacy studies, and history of writing.

This book is a collection of cutting-edge essays on the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of ancient Mediterranean media culture, featuring interdisciplinary feedback from scholars in New Testament studies and Classics.

Egyptian Deportations of the Late Bronze Age explores the political economy of deportations in New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1550–1070 BCE) from an interdisciplinary angle. The analysis of ancient Egyptian primary source material and the international correspondence of the time draws a comprehensive picture of the complex and far-reaching policies. The dataset reveals their geographic scope, economic and demographic impact in Egypt and abroad as well as their interconnection with territorial expansion, international relations, and labour management. The supply chain, profiting institutions and individuals in Egypt as the well as the labour tasks, origins and the composition of the deportees are discussed in detail. A comparative analytical framework integrates the Egyptian policies with a review of deportation discourses as well as historical premodern and modern cases and enables a global and diachronic understanding of the topic. The study is thus the first systematic investigation of deportations in ancient Egyptian history and offers new insights into Egyptian governance that revise previous assessments of the role of forced migration und unfree labour in ancient Egyptian society and their long-term effects.

An engrossing study of literacy and the scribal economy at the village level

In the midst of academic debates about the utility of the term “magic” and the cultural meaning of ancient words like mageia or khesheph, this Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic seeks to advance the discussion by separating out three topics essential to the very idea of magic. The three major sections of this volume address (1) indigenous terminologies for ambiguous or illicit ritual in antiquity; (2) the ancient texts, manuals, and artifacts commonly designated “magical” or used to represent ancient magic; and (3) a series of contexts, from the written word to materiality itself, to which the term “magic” might usefully pertain. The individual essays in this volume cover most of Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity, with essays by both established and emergent scholars of ancient religions. In a burgeoning field of “magic studies” trying both to preserve and to justify critically the category itself, this volume brings new clarity and provocative insights. This will be an indispensable resource to all interested in magic in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, ancient Greece and Rome, Early Christianity and Judaism, Egypt through the Christian period, and also comparative and critical theory. Contributors are: Magali Bailliot, Gideon Bohak, Véronique Dasen, Albert de Jong, Jacco Dieleman, Esther Eidinow, David Frankfurter, Fritz Graf, Yuval Harari, Naomi Janowitz, Sarah Iles Johnston, Roy D. Kotansky, Arpad M. Nagy, Daniel Schwemer, Joseph E. Sanzo, Jacques van der Vliet, Andrew Wilburn.