Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt
Author: Emily Teeter
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2003
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Emily Teter, research associate at the Institute, has selected 62 works from the over 25,000 in the Egyptian collection at the Oriental Institute at the U. of Chicago to provide the general reader and visitor with a sample of the breadth and significance of this little published collection. In addition to the royal portraits and relief sculpture commonly associated with Egyptian art, some more unusual works are included, such as lamps, grooming implements, and games. A history of the collection, especially the role of James Henry Breasted, begins the volume. A glossary, bibliography, map, chronology, and three indexes are included. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Pioneer to the Past (Abridged, Annotated)

Pioneer to the Past (Abridged, Annotated)
Author: Charles Breasted
Publisher: BIG BYTE BOOKS
Total Pages: 486
Release: 1945-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN:

The challenging and exciting life of James Henry Breasted spanned the most important years of the early western exploration of ancient Egypt. He was at the center of turbulent and world-changing events, including World War I and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter. An immensely talented scholar, he explored the Nile Valley and its antiquities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, recording inscriptions and participating in digs with men like Petrie. At his side was his wife, as well as his son Charles, who wrote this admiring work about the life and times of his father. James Breasted was consulted with by such men as General Allenby during WWI. When Howard Carter discovered Tut's tomb in 1922, one of the first men he and his patron, Lord Carnarvon, contacted was Breasted. He not only saw the tomb shortly after its discovery, his effort to mediate between Carter and the Egyptian government when Carter was later locked out of the tomb is detailed here. You cannot understand ancient Egypt or modern Egyptology without knowing about Breasted's remarkable life. He was the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

American Egyptologist

American Egyptologist
Author: Jeffrey Abt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2012-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226001121

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud. In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology. An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.

Picturing the Past

Picturing the Past
Author: Jack Green
Publisher: Oriental Institute Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Archaeological illustration
ISBN: 9781885923899

This fully illustrated catalogue of essays, descriptions, and commentary accompanies the Oriental Institute special exhibit Picturing the Past: Imaging and Imagining the Ancient Middle East (on exhibit February 7 through September 2, 2012). Picturing the Past presents paintings, architectural reconstructions, facsimiles, models, photographs, and computer-aided reconstructions that show how the architecture, sites, and artifacts of the ancient Middle East have been documented. It also examines how the publication of those images have shaped our perception of the ancient world, and how some of the more "imaginary" reconstructions have obscured our real understanding of the past. The exhibit and catalog also show how features of the ancient Middle East have been presented in different ways for different audiences, in some cases transforming a highly academic image into a widely recognized icon of the past.

Chogha Mish

Chogha Mish
Author: Pinhas Delougaz
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN:

The present publication is the final report on the eleven seasons of excavations at Chogha Mish. In addition to the materials and records from Chogha Mish, Alizadeh uses the data available from the excavations of the neighboring sites of Chogha Bonut and Boneh Fazl Ali to augment his reconstruction of Susiana prehistoric development. Together, these three sites cover a long period from ca. 7200 to 500 B.C. While most researchers see the fourth millennium as a pivotal period in the development of state organizations in southwestern Iran as a result of intra-regional competition between various local polities, Alizadeh traces the onset of the conflict of interest between the settled agricultural communities of the lowlands and mobile pastoralists of the highlands to the fifth millennium b.c. In doing so, Alizadeh considers a much more substantial role for the ancient mobile pastoralists of the region, placing Chogha Mish in a much wider regional context and arguing that at the beginning of the fifth millennium BC, as the local elite were rapidly developing, lowland Susiana shifted its orientation from Mesopotamia to highland Iran, where most of the material resources are located. He attributes this shift to the development of mobile pastoralism in highland Iran and considers the ancient mobile pastoralists as the agents of contact between the highlands and the lowlands. Database of faunal remains available online.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Author: University of Chicago. Oriental Institute
Publisher: Oriental Institute Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Book of the dead
ISBN: 9781885923806

Hope for life after death is evidenced even in prehistoric times in Upper Egypt. The first written aids for attaining and supporting life in the hereafter were the Pyramid Texts inscribed within royal tombs towards the end of the Old Kingdom. In the Middle Kingdom, many texts were borrowed from the pyramid chambers and mingled with new spells; this new form, which today we call Coffin Texts, was usually written inside coffins. These eventually gave way to what we now know as the Book of the Dead. The collections of spells were usually written on rolls of papyrus, that is, in the form of an Egyptian book. Presented here are seventy Book of the Dead documents housed in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago. These documents, represented in whole or in part - all Eighteenth Dynasty or later - include seven papyri, three coffins, a shroud, a statuette, three stelae or similar and fifty-five ushabties. This is the first digital reprint of the 1960 publication.

Neo-Babylonian Texts in the Oriental Institute Collection

Neo-Babylonian Texts in the Oriental Institute Collection
Author: David B. Weisberg
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2003
Genre: Education
ISBN:

The 173 texts contained in this volume were acquired by the Oriental Institute Tablet Collection over a long period of years from various sources. The texts are dated from 699 to 423 BC, during the Neo-Babylonian period. The more noteworthy subject matter of the texts includes an adoption document, sale of houses and a field (from the Nur-Sin archive), a "datio in solutum," a court protocol concerning a loan of silver with interest specified, a loan of silver with interest specified, proceedings in the assembly concerning personal status, a Mar Banutu text from the town of Hubat, a court record concerning the status of a freed person, a contract with fowlers to supply birds to Eanna, an inventory of the finery of the Lady-of-Uruk for craftsmen, a four-column list of precious objects, a two-column list of words, a tablet whose obverse records part of a contract and whose reverse is from Sb B, a fragment of an Akkadian religious text or medical or astrological commentary, and a fragment of a literary text. The book contains transliterations, translations, text notes, commentary, indices, and a mixture of hand-drawn copies and photographs of the tablets.