Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite conceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary ancient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detailed archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The result is a meaningful portrait composed of individual biographies, communities, and landscapes.
Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories that the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lynn Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrangements, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and attitudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians of the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, reproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of communities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, including important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians—the ways, for instance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterned their experiences.
Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived of by ancient Egyptians in all their variety. This makes Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt unique in Egyptology and fascinating to read.
Lynn Meskell is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and Field Director of a major urban excavation in Egypt. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, the author of Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Et Cetera in Ancient Egypt, and the editor of Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics, and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.
"Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt is a happy example of a synthesis of factual knowledge and theoretical questioning. It has much to say, both about a particular and well-documented society and about the nature of the suppositions that a modern scholar needs to bring to such a society to make sense of it. . . . [It] brings together an impressive range of material, sets this material sensibly in context and uses the testimony of an ancient society to remind us what it is to be human, and how life's challenges and limitations need to be met."—John Ray, Times Higher Education Supplement
"Drawing on extensive archaeological and textual evidence . . . Meskell draws a richly nuanced picture of life in an Egyptian village in New Kingdom Egypt, using the concept of human life cycle as her organizing framework."—Choice
"For [general readers] the book will clearly be an extremely useful source for understanding the private lives of the Egyptians at this time. For Egyptologists it should provide a unified, up-to-date view of this aspect of the subject and Lynn Meskell has done scholars a service in writing it."—Helen Strudwick, Antiquity
"Informative, well researched, entertaining, and [it] makes an important contribution to the field."—Ellen Morris, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
"Lynn Meskell has written the most detailed and insightful account of ordinary life in New Kingdom Egypt ever to see print. It will supersede all previous works on this subject."—Bruce Trigger, McGill University
"This is an original, stimulating, and readable work. The author presents life in ancient Egypt in an illuminating biographical framework, treating personal relations, gender, and sexuality extensively on the basis of a uniquely rich archaeological and textual record, especially from Deir el-Medina. The book makes a most valuable contribution at the levels of theory and of vital and accessible data."—John Baines, Oxford University
"Egyptology has been for many decades an intensely conservative, text-based discipline. Meskell's work is refreshing for breaking away to reassess textual, visual, and archaeological evidence to reconstruct how individuals experienced private life in the New Kingdom. It is well written and very accessible—an excellent and innovative project that will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, students, and general readers."—Gay Robins, author of The Art of Ancient Egypt
