Changes

Any careful examination of a pre-modern culture or period should include a historiographical analysis. Understanding ancient historical texts can tell modern scholars a lot, not just about chronology, but more importantly, as Gozzoli argues, historiographical texts can give us a window into what these people were <i>thinking</i>. This book analyzes most of the important, published historiographical texts from ancient Egypt’s Late Period: the first part includes royal inscriptions, while the second part examines histories, folk tales, and eschatological texts.

As the title of this book suggests, a large portion of this study is dedicated to the period of Nubian rule in Egypt – the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. Mokot goes beyond Nubian rule in Egypt, though, by providing an in-depth study of Nubian culture in Sudan before the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, as well as after the Nubian rulers were expelled from Egypt in 664 BC. The author combines both archaeological and textual evidence to present a work that is accessible to academics and lay people alike.

Although this book is several decades old now, it is still relevant in terms of historiography and the accuracy of the translations. This book is a collection of Egyptian hieroglyphic texts from the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty – the first era of Achaemenid Persian dominance in Egypt (525-404 BC) – from a variety of different contexts, including royal inscriptions, funerary offerings, and religious texts. Hieroglyphic transcriptions of the texts are provided along with French translations. Posener acknowledged in the introduction that most knowledge Egyptologists’ had of the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty before this publication came from Greco-Roman sources, such as Herodotus, which have a tendency to be distorted, especially concerning the Achaemenid Persians who were the rivals of many of the Greek city-states. He intended for his collection of texts to fill in the gaps that were often left by the Greco-Roman sources and to provide a more complete and objective image of the period.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Achaemenid Persian Empire was how its kings were able to keep such a vast and diverse subject population under control for so long. One of the tactics the Persians used was the deployment of strategic military garrisons throughout the empire. During the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty, the Persian kings established a colony of Jewish mercenaries near the city of Elephantine (modern Aswan), which was documented by its inhabitants in a collection of Aramaic papyri. In this book, Joisten-Pruschke presents a number of previously published Aramaic papyri from Elephantine with new German translations. The author also gives a historical background of the colony and discusses some major events, including the construction of a Yahweh temple and communal violence between the Jews and priests of the Egyptian god Khnum during the reign of Darius II in 410 BC.

Chauveau examines the period of Greek/Ptolemaic rule in Egypt (332-30 BC) in this engaging book. The first chapter is a brief chronological survey of the period, but the majority of the book is dedicated to important thematic issues in Ptolemaic Egypt such as the relationship between the Greek and native Egyptian communities, changes in religious life, and the nature of the Ptolemaic economy.

This book covers Ptolemaic era Egypt through the Roman Period, ending with the advent of the Islamic conquest in AD 642. Like Chauveau’s book, Bowman examines Greek and Roman Egypt with a more thematic approach, but in a much more dense and academic manner. Bowman places a greater emphasis on the social history of the period, particularly how the Greek and native Egyptian communities interacted, than he does on imperial politics and chronology.

[[Category: Ancient Egyptian History]] [[Category: Late Period Egypt]] [[Category: Booklists]]