Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt

This book brings together a generous selection of John Baines's influential writings on two core areas of ancient Egyptian civilization, complementing them with three new chapters. The opening essay, written specifically for the volume, studies the role of visual and written communication in early civilizations together with their background in prehistory. It then introduces the concept of decorum, which the author uses as an organizing principle in interpreting ancient Egyptian social life as well as works of art and texts. The chapters on 'Written culture' begin with a set of studies of literacy. A survey of uses of writing is followed by a discussion of rates of literacy, together with detailed analyses of the literacy of kings, women, and the village community of Deir el-Medina (c.1200 BCE). Two essays address writing's early development and its implications for archaeology. This part concludes with a new analysis of the context of writing within its setting of orality and a study of ancient uses of the past, many of which are profoundly influenced by the potential of writing. The Second group of studies, 'Visual culture', includes essays on both visual and cognitive questions, ranging from pictorial representation through colour terminology to the high-cultural use of stone and the position of art in elite culture. Several of the book's chapters focus on the formative period of the late fourth and early third millennia in Egypt, which is currently the object of intense research and debate. This well illustrated and fully updated volume assembles studies that were scattered in publications in a variety of disciplines, making available key contributions on core problems of theory,comparison, and analysis that affect the study of many civilizations. The book is organized as a synthesis that offers numerous points of departure for further research.