The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia
Author: Geoff Emberling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1217
Release: 2020-12-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197521835

The cultures of Nubia built the earliest cities, states, and empires of inner Africa, but they remain relatively poorly known outside their modern descendants and the community of archaeologists, historians, and art historians researching them. The earliest archaeological work in Nubia was motivated by the region's role as neighbor, trade partner, and enemy of ancient Egypt. Increasingly, however, ancient Nile-based Nubian cultures are recognized in their own right as the earliest complex societies in inner Africa. As agro-pastoral cultures, Nubian settlement, economy, political organization, and religious ideologies were often organized differently from those of the urban, bureaucratic, and predominantly agricultural states of Egypt and the ancient Near East. Nubian societies are thus of great interest in comparative study, and are also recognized for their broader impact on the histories of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia brings together chapters by an international group of scholars on a wide variety of topics that relate to the history and archaeology of the region. After important introductory chapters on the history of research in Nubia and on its climate and physical environment, the largest part of the volume focuses on the sequence of cultures that lead almost to the present day. Several cross-cutting themes are woven through these chapters, including essays on desert cultures and on Nubians in Egypt. Eleven final chapters synthesize subjects across all historical phases, including gender and the body, economy and trade, landscape archaeology, iron working, and stone quarrying.

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt
Author: Christina Riggs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 814
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199571457

This handbook, arranged in seven thematic sections, is unique in drawing together many different strands of research on Roman Egypt, in order to suggest both the state of knowledge in the field and the possibilities for collaborative, synthetic, and interpretive research.

Medieval Nubia

Medieval Nubia
Author: Giovanni R. Ruffini
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199996202

As one of the few surviving archaeological sites from the medieval Christian kingdom of Nubia, Qasr Ibrim is critically important in a number of ways. It is the only site in Lower Nubia that remained above water after the completion of the Aswan high dam. In addition, thanks to the aridity of the climate in the area, the site is marked by extraordinary preservation of organic material, especially textual material written on papyrus, leather, and paper. Particularly rich is the textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, written in Old Nubian, the region's indigenous language. As a result, Qasr Ibrim is probably the best documented ancient and medieval site in Africa outside of Egypt and the Maghreb. Medieval Nubia is the first book to make available this remarkable material, much of which is still unpublished. The evidence discovered reveals a more complicated picture of this community than originally thought. Previously, it was accepted that medieval Nubia had existed in relative isolation from the rest of the world, subsisting on a primitive economy. Legal documents, accounts, and letters, however, reveal a complex, monetized economy with exchange rates connected to those of the wider world. Furthermore, they reveal public festive practices, in which lavish feasting and food gifts reinforced the social prestige of the participants. These documents prove medieval Nubia to have been a society combining legal elements inherited from the Greco-Roman world with indigenous African social practices. In reconstructing the social and economic life of medieval Nubia based on the Old Nubian sources from the site, as well as other previously examined materials, Giovanni R. Ruffini corrects previous assumptions and provides a new picture of Nubia, one that links it to the wider Mediterranean economy and society of its time.

Ancient Nubia

Ancient Nubia
Author: Marjorie M. Fisher
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1649033974

A lushly illustrated gazetteer of the archaeological sites of southern Egypt and northern Sudan and named a 2012 American Publishers (PROSE) Awards winner for Best Archaeology & Anthropology Book For most of the modern world, ancient Nubia seems an unknown and enigmatic land. Only a handful of archaeologists have studied its history or unearthed the Nubian cities, temples, and cemeteries that once dotted the landscape of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nubia’s remote setting in the midst of an inhospitable desert, with access by river blocked by impassable rapids, has lent it not only an air of mystery, but also isolated it from exploration. Over the past century, particularly during this last generation, scholars have begun to focus more attention on the fascinating cultures of ancient Nubia, ironically prompted by the construction of large dams that have flooded vast tracts of the ancient land. This book attempts to document some of what has recently been discovered about ancient Nubia, with its remarkable history, architecture, and culture, and thereby to give us a picture of this rich, but unfamiliar, African legacy.

The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology

The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology
Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1077
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191626147

Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.

Indo-European Perspectives

Indo-European Perspectives
Author: J. H. W. Penney
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 619
Release: 2004-10-14
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0199258929

This book brings together new and original work by forty two of the world's leading scholars of Indo-European comparative philology and linguistics from around the world. It shows the breadth and the continuing liveliness of enquiry in an area which over the last century and a half has opened many unique windows on the civilizations of the ancient world. The volume is a tribute to Anna Morpurgo Davies to mark her retirement as the Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. The book's six parts are concerned with the early history of Indo-European (Part I); language use, variation, and change in ancient Greece and Anatolia (Parts II and III); the Indo-European languages of Western Europe, including Latin, Welsh, and Anglo-Saxon (Part IV); the ancient Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages (Part V); and the history of Indo-European linguistics (Part VI). Indo-European Perspectives will interest scholars and students of Indo-European philology, historical linguistics, classics, and the history of the ancient world.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN READINGS

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN READINGS
Author: Wim van den Dungen
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2016-01-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1329656490

English translation of selected Ancient Egyptian texts, bringing to life the sapiential, magical, ceremonial and theological traditions at work in the 'House of Life' of Pharaonic Egypt. Included are: Instruction to Hordedef, Instruction to Kagemni, Pyramid Texts (of Unas), Instruction to Merikare, To Become Magic, Discourse of a Man with his Ba, Instruction to Amenemhat, The Great Praise of the Aten, The Book of the Cow of Heaven, Hymns to Amun, The Shabaka Stone, Instruction to Amen-em-apt, The Adoration of Re. These readings span a period of thirteen centuries, covering all important stages of Ancient Egyptian literature. Translated from Egyptian originals and ordered chronologically, these texts were considered by the Ancient Egyptians as part of the core of their vast literature.

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas
Author: Robert L. Paquette
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780198758815

A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.

The Black Kingdom of the Nile

The Black Kingdom of the Nile
Author: Charles Bonnet
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-05-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674986679

Landmark archaeological excavations that radically revise the early history of Africa. For the past fifty years, Charles Bonnet has been excavating sites in present-day Sudan and Egypt that point to the existence of a sophisticated ancient black African civilization thriving alongside the Egyptians. In The Black Kingdom of the Nile, he gathers the results of these excavations to reveal the distinctively indigenous culture of the black Nubian city of Kerma, the capital of the Kingdom of Kush. This powerful and complex political state organized trade to the Mediterranean basin and built up a military strong enough to resist Egyptian forces. Further explorations at Dukki Gel, north of Kerma, reveal a major Nubian fortified city of the mid-second millennium BCE featuring complex round and oval structures. Bonnet also found evidence of the revival of another powerful black Nubian society, seven centuries after Egypt conquered Kush around 1500 BCE, when he unearthed seven life-size granite statues of Black Pharaohs (ca. 744–656 BCE). Bonnet’s discoveries have shaken our understanding of the origins and sophistication of early civilization in the heart of black Africa. Until Bonnet began his work, no one knew the extent and power of the Nubian state or the existence of the Black Pharaohs who presided successfully over their lands. The political, military, and commercial achievements revealed in these Nubian sites challenge our long-held belief that the Egyptians were far more advanced than their southern neighbors and that black kingdoms were effectively vassal states. Charles Bonnet’s discovery of this lost black kingdom forces us to rewrite the early history of the African continent.