Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt

by Lynn Meskell

Book Overview

Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detailed archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The result...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069100448X
• ISBN13: 9780691004488
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Scholarly Yes, Thesis No

There are a wide variety of books on Ancient Egypt; they go from the pseudo-scientific-aliens-created-the-pyramids to the popular books for the general audience to the academic ones and everything in-between. PRIVATE LIFE IN NEW KINGDOM EGYPT by Lynn Meskell is a scholastic book. It is not a thesis. It uses short citations within the text to show where the author, an associate professor at Columbia University, acquired her ideas and information. This is used in many academic texts, not just in Egyptology, but in other areas as well. If the reader is not use to this type of writing, it might throw her/him off a bit. Personally my eyes just skim this and move on, unless it's something I want to look up.What is in this book? Chapter One, Interpretive Framework, establishes the author's ideas. Meskell's main focus is on the living. How did the ancient Egyptians live and how did they think and feel. In this chapter the author tells why and how she is going about this. This is another professorial convention and is always boring for the average reader.Chapter Two, Locales and Communities, is about how the Egyptians thought of themselves as a nation, people and local community. What did they call themselves? How are they different from other people around them? It is also how cities and houses were set up. Chapter Three, Social Selves, the idea of personhood from pregnancy, birth, stages of life to death is examined. Chapter Four, Founding a House, marriage, personal relationships within a household and who encompasses part of a household are examined. Chapter Five, Love, Eroticism, and the Sexual Self, is self-explanatory. There are highly interesting things on how sexuality was thought by the Egyptians, which are different from how our modern society interprets things. Chapter Six, Embodied Knowledge, items used by the body and how it explains the Egyptians are what this chapter looks at. Chapter Seven, Cycles of Death and Life, examines the idea of death in the non-elite society. There is a short Postscript, which is a kind of conclusion. This book is 238 pages long and contains notes, a bibliography and an index.Professor Lynn Meskell draws on text, archeology items, art, and ideas in sociology and anthropology to bring us as close to the Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom as possible. Unfortunately, she is not writing a popular text for the general audience, so her ideas might have to wait for some people. Ideas from academia usually surface first in papers published for other scholars, books published for the collegiate world, then books for the general audience and then documentaries seen on television, in which complex ideas are often lost in visuals or sensationalism. If you are looking for a read for the general audience then this is not your book. Try books by Bob Brier or Joann Fletcher or others. This book, however, should not be used as an introductory text to the world of Ancient Egypt. But sooner or later, if you're interested in more than