Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 12

When this book appeared in its first edition in the fall of 2011, Egypt was constantly in the news, not for its ancient past but because of the popular uprising against the regime headed by Hosni Mubarak, a president who was regularly called “Egypt’s last pharaoh.” The following years were often very difficult for the country’s inhabitants, with much political conflict, insecurity, and a collapse of the tourism industry, which had been one of the major sources of income. Modern events in a region do impact what students of its history can do, and indeed many archaeological projects were suspended. Yet research on Egypt’s ancient civilization did not slow down. Scholars around the world continued to write on all aspects of history, pursuing established approaches, but also introducing new concerns and sometimes new methodologies. For example, DNA analyses of mummies are more widespread today than they were 10 years ago, while climate change has become more popular as a historical explanation. Also, new archaeological discoveries, often the work of Egyptian researchers, continued to be announced. At the same time, I was encouraged to rethink how to teach the history of ancient Egypt to a succession of undergraduate students at Columbia University, with their varied backgrounds and interests, so when I was given the opportunity to revise this textbook, more than a decade after the first edition was written, I was happy to do so.

The aims of the book remain the same from the first edition. It aspires to provide anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt with a basic survey that pays attention to all periods of its 3000‐year‐long history and covers the main events. It is intended to be used as an undergraduate textbook – as I do in my classes – but also to be accessible to a wider public. For its structure it follows the chronology of ancient Egypt’s political history, a traditional format that forms the background of all investigations on that culture. Archaeologists, museum curators, and ancient historians with many different approaches and interests, all place their comments in the chronological boxes of Kingdom and Intermediate Periods, dynasties, and individual reigns, which to them as specialists are almost natural and which anyone who wants to contextualize anything ancient Egyptian has to learn. My chapters coincide with these divisions and use them in their titles in order to provide a structure that enables readers to situate other information within that structure. Within each chapter, I do provide chronological tables that break the period up into dynasties, but I do not survey the periods dynasty by dynasty, or reign by reign, as some other books do. I also hope to give every era sufficient attention and not privilege certain times when Egypt’s “glory” was the greatest over others when its remains were not so grand. Obviously, periods when the evidence we have is very rich and we can study the history in more detail get more room in this book than others. Also, the time after Egypt’s conquest by Alexander in 332 BC to the end of my story in AD 395, for which we have an abundance of documentation that enables an intricate reconstruction of events, is squeezed into a single chapter. That period is often called “Egypt after the Pharaohs,” and I follow most histories of ancient Egypt in giving it less attention.

Because this is an introductory book with limitations to its size, I cannot give every aspect of Egyptian history equal attention and had to make choices about my focus. Political history dominates, and in that history the deeds of leading men are often the focus. I speak a lot about building projects and wars, much less about the daily lives of the people who provided the labor and suffered the consequences of conflict. The textual sources get more attention than the material ones, and in the latter group the impressive remains more than the simple ones. Other histories can be written and have been, but this book follows many others whose focus is dictated by how strongly the evidence we have speaks to us. It serves as an introduction.

As was the case in the first edition, I have to acknowledge that this book, as every other introductory survey, does not argue – it asserts. Even if sentences are qualified by words like “seemingly” (often omitted to avoid clutter in the text), they give the impression that there is certainty. That is far from true. Every page, if not paragraph, probably contains a statement that will offend someone who has argued differently in writing or lectures. It is impossible to acknowledge every scholarly opinion in an introductory book that covers the entirety of ancient Egyptian history. I chose to follow interpretations that I found the most convincing or appealing, and in the Guide to Further Reading gave preference to works that were the most useful in guiding my decisions. Like most of my colleagues, as a teacher I demand from my students that they acknowledge the sources they use when writing a research paper. It may thus seem that I set the wrong example here by not specifically referencing where I found an idea or what scholar’s view I follow. If I had chosen to give full bibliographic references, I would have produced a very different book, longer and probably more daunting to a general reader. But, in order to counteract the impression that what I have written is generally accepted fact, I have included sections called Key Debate in each chapter to survey different views on a specific topic and give more detailed notes with scholarly references. In these sections I often stress how interpretations have evolved because of changing modern preoccupations rather than a clearer understanding. Historians do not live in a vacuum, and their interests and explanations reflect their own conditions. I admit that even in these sections I could not acknowledge all that has been written on a topic; the bibliography is simply too vast.

I have to thank several people for their help and encouragement during the writing of this book. Wiley’s Executive Editor Todd Green urged me to prepare a second edition and made it possible for me to do so, and the copy‐editor, Giles Flitney, expertly removed unclear statements and contradictions from the manuscript. The advice of scholars who helped me during the writing of the first edition – John Baines, Ronald Leprohon, Gay Robins, Thomas Schneider, and Willeke Wendrich – was still very important for the version printed here. Richard Parkinson and Robert Simpson were kind enough to let me reuse their translations of several ancient Egyptian texts. The other textual sources quoted were updated and standardized by Katya Barbash and Robert Simpson for the first edition and repeated here. Richard Parkinson and Barry Kemp allowed me to reproduce images they had created. I want to reiterate my thanks to various groups of Columbia undergraduate students who in successive years have shown an interest in the ancient history of Egypt and have forced me to clarify my thoughts on the subject. Their presence in my lectures has strengthened my belief that the study of ancient Egyptian civilization, one of the greatest in world history, is still a worthwhile enterprise today.

I hope this book will inspire others to explore it too.

Damme

August 2020