The Ucl Lahun Papyri

The University College London Lahun (Middle Kingdom) papyri constitute one of the most remarkable harvests of papyri of any age. This volume communicates the content of the surviving letters and letter fragments from the Petrie excavations at Lahun in an accessible and affordable format.

This volume presents transcriptions with transliterations and translations of five broad types of papyri discovered during Petrie's excavations of Lahun. Digital photographs of the papyri are presented on the enclosed CD.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains pictures related to accompanying text.

The first economic history of ancient Egypt employing a New Institutional Economics approach and covering the entire pharaonic period, 3000-30 BCE.

The term ‘canonicity’ implies the recognition that the domain of literature and of the library is also a cultural and political one, related to various forms of identity formation, maintenance, and change. Scribes and benefactors ‘create’ canon in as much as they teach, analyze, preserve, prom¬ulgate and change ‘canonical’ texts according to prevailing norms. From early on, texts from the written traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were accumulated, codified, and to some extent canonized, as various collections developed mainly in the environment of the temple and the palace. These written traditions represent sets of formal and informal cultures that all speak in their own ways of canonicity, normativity, and other forms of cultural expertise. Some forms of literature were used not only in scholarly contexts, but also in political ones, and they served purposes of identity formation. This volume addresses the interrelations between various forms of ‘canon’ and identity formation in different time periods, genres, regions, and contexts, as well as the application of contemporary conceptions of ‘canon’ to ancient texts.

Inhalt: Martina Aprile: A study on the procurement of offerings system for the funerary complex of Senwosret II at el-Lahun Alessio Delli Castelli: The Definition of Art and Sculpture Concerning Kai Widmaier's Bilderwelten Abraham I. Fernández Pichel, David Klotz: Fundamental Texts of Latopolitan Theology. The Bandeau Inscriptions from the Soubassements of the Ptolemaic Façade (Esna II, 16 and 30) Brendan Hainline: Markers of Non-Royal Ritual Utterances in the Pyramid Texts Sabine Herrmann: "Cette pyramide est bâtie en forme de pavillon". Zur Entdeckungsgeschichte der Pyramiden von Dahshur in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit Jochem Kahl, Mohamed Abdelrahiem, Anna Arpaia, Andrea Kilian, Chiori Kitagawa, Jan Moje, Philipp Scharfenberger: The Asyut Project: Sixteenth Season of Fieldwork (2022) Florence Langermann: Seven Fragments of a Healing Statue from Heliopolis/Matareya Bieke Mahieu: The Identification and Sequence of the Hyksos Kings in Dynasty 15 Mostafa Hassan Nour, John M. Iskander, Sameh Hashem: The Stela of King Apries from El-Qantara Gharb. A Royal Journey to the Eastern Borders Anthony Spalinger: Chariot Wheels

A survey of ancient Egyptian mathematics across three thousand years Mathematics in Ancient Egypt traces the development of Egyptian mathematics, from the end of the fourth millennium BC—and the earliest hints of writing and number notation—to the end of the pharaonic period in Greco-Roman times. Drawing from mathematical texts, architectural drawings, administrative documents, and other sources, Annette Imhausen surveys three thousand years of Egyptian history to present an integrated picture of theoretical mathematics in relation to the daily practices of Egyptian life and social structures. Imhausen shows that from the earliest beginnings, pharaonic civilization used numerical techniques to efficiently control and use their material resources and labor. Even during the Old Kingdom, a variety of metrological systems had already been devised. By the Middle Kingdom, procedures had been established to teach mathematical techniques to scribes in order to make them proficient administrators for their king. Imhausen looks at counterparts to the notation of zero, suggests an explanation for the evolution of unit fractions, and analyzes concepts of arithmetic techniques. She draws connections and comparisons to Mesopotamian mathematics, examines which individuals in Egyptian society held mathematical knowledge, and considers which scribes were trained in mathematical ideas and why. Of interest to historians of mathematics, mathematicians, Egyptologists, and all those curious about Egyptian culture, Mathematics in Ancient Egypt sheds new light on a civilization's unique mathematical evolution.

The creation of the Library of Alexandria is widely regarded as one of the great achievements in the history of humankind - a giant endeavour to amass all known literature and scholarly texts in one central location, so as to preserve it and make it available for the public. In turn, this event has been viewed as a historical turning point that separates the ancient world from classical antiquity. Standard works on the library continue to present the idea behind the institution as novel and, at least implicitly, as a product of Greek thought. Yet, although the scale of the collection in Alexandria seems to have been unprecedented, the notion of creating central repositories of knowledge, while perhaps new to Greek tradition, was age-old in the Near East where the building was erected. Here the existence of libraries can be traced back another two millennia, from the twenty-seventh century BCE to the third century CE, and so the creation of the Library in Alexandria was not so much the beginning of an intellectual adventure as the impressive culmination of a very long tradition. This volume presents the first comprehensive study of these ancient libraries across the 'Cradle of Civilization' and traces their institutional and scholarly roots back to the early cities and states and the advent of writing itself. Leading specialists in the intellectual history of each individual period and region covered in the volume present and discuss the enormous textual and archaeological material available on the early collections, offering a uniquely readable account intended for a broad audience of the libraries in Egypt and Western Asia as centres of knowledge prior to the famous Library of Alexandria.