Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde – Beihefte

The belief that dead people could assume non-human forms is attested in Egyptian texts of all periods, from the Old Kingdom down to Graeco-Roman times. It was thought that assuming such forms enhanced their freedom of movement and access to nourishment in the afterlife, as well as allowing them to join the entourages of different deities and participate in their worship. Spells referring to or enabling the deceased’s transformations occur in the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, and the Book of the Dead. But it is not until the Graeco-Roman Period that we find entire compositions devoted to this theme. Two of the most important are P. Louvre N. 3122 and P. Berlin P. 3162, both written in hieratic and dating to the 1st century AD. Both texts have been known to Egyptologists for more than a century, but neither is currently available in an up-to-date comprehensive edition. This book provides such an edition, including high-resolution images of the manuscripts, hieroglyphic transcriptions, translations, descriptions of their material aspects, studies of their owners, their titles, and their families, reconstructions of their context of usage, analyses of their orthography and grammar, and detailed commentaries on their contents.

In order to draw a picture of the royal residence town of Memphis and its inhabitants during the New Kingdom period (1550–1070 BCE) that is as representative as possible, this volume has analyzed all of the available written witnesses in one extensive corpus. It is on this basis that individuals have not just been identified, but their personal relationship patterns reconstructed within a historical network of people.

The legacies of Old Egyptian society range from monumental pyramids to the microscopic traces of human activity, from stone inscriptions to novels. How can these things be put into a meaningful context, and what methods and questions would this require? This book brings together 28 contributions written in honor of Stephan J. Seidlmayer that try to provide up-to-date answers to these questions.

Egyptian Deportations of the Late Bronze Age explores the political economy of deportations in New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1550–1070 BCE) from an interdisciplinary angle. The analysis of ancient Egyptian primary source material and the international correspondence of the time draws a comprehensive picture of the complex and far-reaching policies. The dataset reveals their geographic scope, economic and demographic impact in Egypt and abroad as well as their interconnection with territorial expansion, international relations, and labour management. The supply chain, profiting institutions and individuals in Egypt as the well as the labour tasks, origins and the composition of the deportees are discussed in detail. A comparative analytical framework integrates the Egyptian policies with a review of deportation discourses as well as historical premodern and modern cases and enables a global and diachronic understanding of the topic. The study is thus the first systematic investigation of deportations in ancient Egyptian history and offers new insights into Egyptian governance that revise previous assessments of the role of forced migration und unfree labour in ancient Egyptian society and their long-term effects.

This is the first synthesis on Egyptian enigmatic writing (also referred to as “cryptography”) in the New Kingdom (c.1550–1070 BCE). Enigmatic writing is an extended practice of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, set against immediate decoding and towards revealing additional levels of meaning. This first volume consists of studies by the main specialists in the field. The second volume is a lexicon of all attested enigmatic signs and values.

This is the first synthesis on Egyptian enigmatic writing (also referred to as “cryptography”) in the New Kingdom (c.1550–1070 BCE). Enigmatic writing is an extended practice of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, set against immediate decoding and towards revealing additional levels of meaning. The first volume consists of studies by the main specialists in the field. This second volume is a lexicon of all attested enigmatic signs and values.

This is the first synthesis on Egyptian enigmatic writing (also referred to as “cryptography”) in the New Kingdom (c.1550–1070 BCE). Enigmatic writing is an extended practice of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, set against immediate decoding and towards revealing additional levels of meaning. This first volume consists of studies by the main specialists in the field. The second volume is a lexicon of all attested enigmatic signs and values.

Petitioning Osiris re-edits, re-analyses, and re-contextualises the "Old Coptic Schmidt Papyrus" and "Curse of Artemisia" – written petitions to different manifestations of Osiris – among the Letters to Gods in Demotic, Greek, and Old Coptic from Egypt. The textual traditions of the Letters to Gods, to the Dead, and Oracle Questions which evidence that ritual tradition of petitioning deities are contextualised among contemporary textual traditions, such as Letters and Petitions to Human Recipients, and Documents of Self-Dedication, and compared to later ritual traditions such as proactive and reactive curses without and with judicial features (so-called Prayers for Justice) in Greek and Coptic from Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. As with all other Letters to Gods, the Old Coptic Schmidt Papyrus and Curse of Artemisia evidence not only the struggles and aspirations of their petitioners, but also the way in which they conceptualised that they could bring about desired outcomes in their lived experience by engaging divine agency through a reciprocal relationship of human-divine interaction. Petitioning Osiris therefore provides a starting point and springboard for readers interested in these, or comparable, textual and ritual traditions from the Ancient World.

The present volume collects current research on manuscripts written in the demotic language, which have recently been discovered in excavations or which can be found in museums worldwide. The manuscripts’ topics range from religion, law, and literature through ancient Egyptian linguistics to the history of economics as well as social history. Featured articles were first presented at the International Conference for Demotic Studies in Leipzig.

In recent years, the histories of ancient science as well as historical epistemology have become hot topics in interdisciplinary research. This volume is a collection of essays on ancient Egyptian science and its agents. Several of the contributions focus on mathematics, the field of expertise of the Berlin Egyptologist Walter F. Reineke, the volume's honorand, but medicine, magic, astrology, botany, and chemistry are also discussed.

The book presents a typological analysis and cultural history of the ceramics discovered by G. Steindorff in 1912–1914 at the S/SA cemetery in the lower Nubian village of Aniba. The approx. 1500 vessels include locally manufactured wares along with imports from the Mediterranean area, of which more than 600 are reproduced in drawings. The precise mapping of the graves permits a new chronology of the cemetery’s occupancy.

Der Band versammelt rund 70 Beiträge zu aktuellen ägyptologischen Forschungen und Fragestellungen; charakteristisch für diese ist, dass sie nur in einem engen Austausch von archäologischen Befunden und philologischen Quellen gewinnbringend entwickelt und weitergedacht werden können. Dabei werden Beispiele aus nahezu allen Epochen der ägyptischen Geschichte sowie zahlreichen Regionen des Landes am Nil berücksichtigt.

G. Steindorff is one of the key figures in 20^th century Egyptology. An examination of his legacy of correspondence provides insight into the motives, contexts, and internal dynamics of Egyptology from 1871 through National Socialism and the early post-war period.

This volume provides the first comprehensive text edition of the Egyptian language sections of P. Bibliothèque Nationale Supplément Grec. 574 (PGM IV) and analysis of their script, language, and the bilingual spells which they are part of. The magical practices preserved in the PDM and PGM have been published for nearly a century, yet it is only recently that research has focused on investigating the complex relationship between the languages, scripts, and religious traditions they exhibit, as well as the question of who composed, copied, and practiced these spells. Focusing on the bilingual divinations, lust spell, and exorcism of PGM IV, written in the Egyptian and Greek languages - and rendered in Old Coptic scripts and the Greek script respectively - this volume analyses their textual content and ritual mechanics, contextualised among the PDM and PGM, and investigates the potential identities of the magical practitioners of late Roman and Late Antique Egypt. Encompassing the disciplines of Egyptology, Coptology, Papyrology, and Late Antique studies, this volume focuses in particular on the themes of magical practice, bilingualism, script, and the social context of magic in Egypt during the 2nd to 4th centuries CE.

The ancient Egyptian toponym Naref and the god Osiris Naref have hitherto been the subject of brief discussions. This study gathers for the first time all data available on these issues, revises traditionally accepted ideas, and offers integral interpretations — contextualizing them in the local milieu.

The book aims to approach the funerary, legal, and royal mythological associations developed around Naref (an important landmark of the Herakleopolitan territory), attested for the first time in the so-called Coffin Texts and enduring until the Roman Period. It also seeks to analyse the characteristics of Osiris Naref, a prominent deity in the Herakleopolitan pantheon from the New Kingdom onwards who achieved suprarregional importance. His key features — centred on the mythical episodes of rebirth and defeat of enemies, justification, and assumption of royal power — gave rise to an Osirian form "who cannot/will not be evicted" from the legitimate and secluded place he has reached. Both aspects are analysed within the wider context of regional (religious, historical, landscape) characteristics.

This monograph offers valuable insights into the study of both local mythical and cultic toponyms and of regional manifestations of Osiris.

With her work The Sculpture of the Egyptians, published in 1914, Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) aroused a great deal of attention among the art-interested public; later, she published The Small Sculpture of the Egyptians. This volume reconstructs for the first time Fechheimer’s biography, illuminating the experience of a female intellectual and Jew whose life straddled the Wilhelmine and Nazi periods.

The Journal for Egyptian Language and Ancient Studies (ZÄS) was first published in 1863, and this special volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the oldest academic journal of Egyptology. Expert contributors present different aspects of the history of German Egyptology, the ZÄS, and important historical figures in the field. The volume covers the National Socialist period, and also includes essays on English, Belgian, and French Egyptology.