Search results for ""Author Ilona Regulski""

Praise for the exhibition ***** The Telegraph ***** The Times ***** Daily Telegraph **** The Evening Standard “Plunge into the infinity pool of ancient Egyptian history with this dizzying array of artworks” - Waldemar Januszczack, Sunday Times Culture magazine Today the history of ancient Egypt is known around the world, recognisable in precious museum collections and countless retellings from popular culture. Yet for hundreds of years, from the late Roman Empire to the 19th century, the wonders of this ancient civilisation were frozen in time, locked in artefacts that could not be understood due to the loss of the ancient Egyptian language. In 1799 the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a slab inscribed in three scripts, hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, changed the course of history, unlocking thousands of years of ancient culture and eventually becoming one of the world’s most famous museum artefacts. The British Museum’s exhibition Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt and this accompanying publication tell the story of the Rosetta Stone and of countless other objects that were key to efforts to decode the hieroglyphs dating back to the Islamic Golden Age. Featuring fascinating objects from the British Museum and international lenders, the book shows how the presence of a written language was the key to understanding life in ancient Egypt, from everyday business affairs to the sacred secrets of the afterlife. Interweaving the story of decipherment with colonial history, the book takes readers up to the present day, revealing what researchers are doing now to tell us more about one of the world’s longest surviving civilisations through the understanding of their writing. Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Jean-François Champollion’s breakthrough in decipherment, this beautifully illustrated book shows how an unassuming grey stone was the key to the secrets of ancient Egypt and led to the most significant code breaking moment in history.

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In trying to reconstruct the early phases of our culture we rely mostly on sources from the ancient Near East. This is perhaps more true of the history of writing than of any other great cultural accomplishment. It would be unthinkable even to try to sketch the history of writing without taking into consideration the written sources of ancient Egypt. The present study would like to contribute to the research of writing evolution in Egypt as an attempt to collect, describe, and evaluate the earliest attestations of writing from a palaeographic point of view. The book aims to present a thorough investigation of the development of sign forms, from its first appearance around 3250 BC until the reign of Djoser (ca. 2700 BC) at the beginning of Dynasty III. It features the first-ever palaeographic collection of all available signs and inscriptions. The survey permitted reconstruction of the complex process of codification and reform of the Egyptian script that finally resulted in the hieroglyphic writing of the Old Kingdom.

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The conference Intercultural Contacts in the Ancient Mediterranean (ICAM) was organised in 2008 by the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo. While Mediterranean contacts in archaeology are a popular topic in Europe, it was the first time this theme was addressed in Egypt. The conference aimed to discuss theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of intercultural contacts in archaeology on the one hand, and to present actual case-studies of such contacts on the other. In the present volume, thirty-five contributions deal with intercultural contacts all over the Mediterranean from the Levant to Spain and from Egypt to Greece, from prehistory up to the Hellenistic period. They are presented in six sections: Theory and methodology, Identifying foreigners and immigrants, Material evidence for contact, Maritime trade and sea ports, Influences in iconography, ideology and religion, and Administration and economy.

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The cultural and historical setting of the Near East provides a unique opportunity to study a longer usage of sealing practices in administration and magic, which extends beyond the constraints of a specific time period or region. Comparing ancient practices with more recent ones can offer important insights into the development of sealing practices and provide answers to specific questions related to the handling of seals and the social status of the seal bearer. This collection of papers is the result of the workshop "Seals and Sealing Practices from Ancient Times until the Present Day. Developments in Administration and Magic through Cultures". The meeting was organized by the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo on December 2-3, 2009, on the occasion of the annual Cleveringa lecture, delivered by Prof. Dr. Petra Sijpesteijn from the University of Leiden. It had the financial support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Cairo. Since the initiative towards the workshop was taken by staff members of the NVIC, the focus was on Egypt but other cultures in the Near East and Central Asia were also considered. Following up on the workshop, the present volume retains the geographical and chronological scope, but added a few contributions dealing with the Greco-Roman and Byzantine periods. Glancing at the content, the reader will be struck by the diachronic and spatial persistence of the use of seals for administrative and other purposes, and by their multi-functionality. Indeed, sealing practices appear to be at least as consistent as writing systems, from their first appearance to modern times. One of the reasons for their success is their ability to adapt to the diverse political, social and cultural pecularities of the multicultural societies at the time.

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