Research Catalog

Title

The mind of Egypt : history and meaning in the time of the Pharaohs / Jan Assmann ; translated by Andrew Jenkins.

Author

Assmann, Jan

Publication

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 513 pages : illustrations, map; 24 cm

Summary

"The Mind of Egypt presents an unprecedented account of the mainsprings of Egyptian civilization - the ideas, values, mentalities, belief systems, and aspirations that shaped the first territorial state in human history. Drawing on a range of literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources, the renowed historian Jan Assmann reconstructs a world of unparalleled complexity, a culture that, long before others, possessed an extraordinary degree of awareness and self-reflection."--Jacket.

Uniform Title

Ägypten (1996). English

Alternative Title

Ägypten (1996).

Subjects

• To 640
• History
• EGITTO ANTICO > Storia
• Egypt > History > To 332 B.C
• Égypte > Histoire > Jusqu'à 640
• Antiquity
• Cultural history
• Historiography
• 15.51 Antiquity
• Egypt > Historiography
• Egypt > History > To 640 A.D

Genre/Form

• History
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 437-476) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction : the meaningful form of history -- The predynastic period and the Old Kingdom. The beginings ; The Old Kingdom -- The first intermediate period. Historical outline ; Traces ; Messages ; Memories -- The Middle Kingdom. Historical outline ; State, script, education : despotism illuminated from within ; The politicization of connective justice ; Wrath and love : the two faces of power and the rhetoric of decision ; The foundation of connective justice in the hereafter : the judgment of the dead ; The two worlds and the language of despair ; Representation, mediacy, the "riven world," and the problem of evil -- The New Kingdom. Historical outline ; Cosmotheism as a form of knowledge ; Akhenaten's revolution ; Personal piety and the theology of will ; Ramesses II and the Battle of Qadesh ; Changing the structure of the past ; The decline of the New Kingdom -- Theocracy, polyarchy, archaism. Tanis and Thebes : the age of division ; Libyan polyarchy and the State of Napata ; Memory and renewal : the Ethiopian and Saite Renaissance -- Egypt under the Persians and Greeks. Historical outline ; The Demotic chronicle and the political messianism of the Late Period ; The cultural construction of otherness : trauma and phobia ; Re-membering Osiris -- Conclusion : Egypt as trace, message, and memory.

ISBN

• 0674012119
• 9780674012110

LCCN

2003050903

OCLC

• 52251299
• SCSB-12792030

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library