PREFACE

This book describes the emergence and development of the distinctive civilization of the ancient Egyptians, from their prehistoric origins to their incorporation into the Roman empire. In 1961 Alan Gardiner’s Egypt of the Pharaohs presented a fresh and detailed view of Egyptian history, based on the textual and archaeological data then available. Gardiner’s history was largely concerned with the activities of kings, governments, and high officials through the centuries, from the beginning of the pharaonic period until the arrival of the Ptolemies. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, however, is concerned not only with political change but also with social and economic developments, processes of religious and ideological change, and trends in material culture, whether in the form of architectural styles, techniques of mummification, or the fabrics of ceramics. This more wide-ranging historical picture draws on the new types of evidence that have become available as archaeologists have begun to survey and excavate types of sites that were previously neglected.

Each chapter describes and analyses a particular phase in ancient Egyptian history. The contributors outline the principal sequence of political events, traces of which have survived to varying degrees in the textual record. However, against this backdrop of the rise and fall of ruling dynasties, they also examine the cultural and social patterns, including stylistic developments in art and literature. This allows them to compare and contrast purely political phases with archaeological and anthropological evidence ranging from the changing styles of pottery to human mortality rates. Each contributor seeks to explore not only which aspects of culture change at different points in time, but also why some change more rapidly than others or remain surprisingly stable at times of political disruption. A major influence on all of the chapters, however, is the patchiness of the archaeological record, which means that some sites and periods can be viewed through a huge number of different types of sources, while others can be only tentatively reconstructed, because of a lack of certain kinds of evidence (through poor preservation, inadequate excavation, or a combination of both). Because each of the periods in Egyptian history is no more or less than the sum of its archaeological and textual parts, the individual chapters in this history are direct reflections of such abundance or inadequacy, and the differences in authors’ style, emphasis, and content can largely be traced back to the nature of the evidence with which they are dealing.

Although the sequence of chapters takes the form of a relatively straightforward historical progression from the Palaeolithic to the Roman period, the various sections incorporate critical approachs to each of the phases, sometimes questioning whether they deserve to be regarded as discrete chronological units, or whether there are broader trends in material culture that transcend (or even conflict with) the perceived political framework. It has been pointed out, for instance, that the decreasing size of royal pyramid complexes after the 4th Dynasty need not be evidence of a decline in royal power, as most historians have tended to assume, but might, on the contrary, indicate a more efficient use of resources in the late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period.

The pace of change in such aspects of Egyptian culture as monumental architecture, funerary beliefs, and ethnicity was not necessarily tied to the rate of political change. Each of the authors of this history has set out to elucidate the underlying patterns of social and political change and to describe, with due regard to the dangers of archaeological and textual distortion and bias, the changing face of Egyptian culture, from the biographical details of individuals to the social and economic factors that shaped the lives of the population as a whole.

IAN SHAW

School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies, The University of Liverpool 31 January 2000