scholarly journals On Borders and Expansion: Egyptian Imperialism in the Levant during the Ramesside Period

Heritage ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 3938-3948
Author(s):  
Georgia Xekalaki

This paper aims to define the way Egyptians perceived the boundaries of their land and reassesses the impact of Egyptian colonialism during the Ramesside period (c. 1292–1069 BCE). During this era, expansive wars, diplomatic action and land administration/governance reforms led Egypt to control a large part of modern Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. To refer to this period, historians often use the terms Egyptian “empire” and Egyptian “imperialism”, extending terminology coined in the 19th century to describe modern cases of political dominance to Late Bronze Age Egypt. Furthermore, traditional scholarship also presents Egypt’s borders in such a way that Egypt appears as a solid territory with fixed borders, despite evidence pointing to a different model of geographical division. Seeking to explore whether the use of modern terms on ancient Egypt may be an anachronism, this paper reviews the scholarship on a) Egyptian records documenting conquests and b) contextual archaeological evidence from the southern Near East itself. This review highlights differences between modern and ancient conceptions of land domination. Finally, Egyptian border-related terms are used in a strictly local symbolic cultural context but not in the one of international diplomacy. As for Egypt’s boundary, it was mostly formed as a buffer zone rather than a borderline.

Author(s):  
Joanna Brück

In 2004, excavation in advance of the construction of a bypass around Mitchelstown in County Cork uncovered a number of pits on the banks of the Gradoge River (Kiely and Sutton 2007). On the bottom of one of these pits, three pottery vessels and a ceramic spoon had been laid on two flat stones. The pots had been deposited in a row: at the centre of the row was a small vessel that clearly models a human face with eyes, a protruding nose and ears, and, at the base of the pot, two feet (cover images). Oak charcoal from the pit returned a date of 1916–1696 cal BC. This find calls into question one of the basic conceptual building blocks that underpins our own contemporary understanding of the world—the distinction between people and objects—for it hints that some artefacts may have been imbued with human qualities and agentive capacities. This book is about the relationship between Bronze Age people and their material worlds. It explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment ‘othering’ of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. As we shall see, there is in fact considerable evidence to suggest that the categorical distinctions drawn in our own cultural context, for example between subject and object, self and other, and culture and nature, were not recognized or articulated in the same way during this period. So too contemporary forms of instrumental reason—encapsulated in a particular understanding of what constitutes logical, practical action and in the distinction we make between the ritual and the secular—have had a profound effect on how we view the Bronze Age world. Our understanding of the Bronze Age has undoubtedly changed dramatically since Christian Jürgensen Thomsen first popularized the term in his famous formulation of the three-age system in 1836 (Morris 1992). The very notion of a ‘Bronze Age’ foregrounds concepts of technical efficiency and advancement that doubtless chimed with the preoccupations and cultural values of Thomsen’s audience in the industrializing world in the nineteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Esma Mania

The Caucasus is considered as one of the difficult geopolitical regions. It includes Georgia, which differs from other Caucasian ethnics in religious-cultural context. Georgia, which has been strongly influenced by Persia and Ottoman Turkey for centuries, as well as by Europe, fully becomes a part of Russian Empire and gets under even stronger European influence. The 19th century Caucasus was characterized by multiculturalism that, in general, causes the atrophy of values and the marginalization of national components, as a result. The subject of our research is the private archive, namely, 700 letters of Grigol Orbeliani (1804-1883), Georgian poet, military person and public figure, the General of the Russian army. In this material, we can find the various concepts of self-identity. In this regard, it is significant to analyze what place was taken by Russian on the one hand and Eastern on the other hand phraseology and sayings in his mentality. How does Orbeliani understand and develop the phenomenon of “homeland”; what forms of tolerance does he reveal; what is his perception on Imperial, Caucasian and Georgian contexts, and so on. These very letters give us the opportunity to find not only Orbelianian contours of self-identity concept, but contributes to our attempts of marking human groups and societies’ ethnic and religious identities as well.


Author(s):  
Joanna Brück

The Bronze Age is frequently framed in social evolutionary terms. Viewed as the period which saw the emergence of social differentiation, the development of long-distance trade, and the intensification of agricultural production, it is seen as the precursor and origin-point for significant aspects of the modern world. This book presents a very different image of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the wealth of material from recent excavations, as well as a long history of research, it explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. There is much to suggest that the conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects, so familiar from our own cultural context, was not drawn in this categorical way in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul. In a series of thematic chapters on the human body, artefacts, settlements, and landscapes, this book considers the character of Bronze Age personhood, the relationship between individual and society, and ideas around agency and social power. The treatment and deposition of things such as querns, axes, and human remains provides insights into the meanings and values ascribed to objects and places, and the ways in which such items acted as social agents in the Bronze Age world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-258
Author(s):  
David A. Warburton

Abstract Based on the productivity of ancient Egyptian agriculture, a discussion of economic theory, per capita GDP, economic growth, and agrarian economies through history, this paper tries to isolate the relative roles of land, labor, and grain in the economy of Ancient Egypt. There is little room for full employment in an agrarian economy; in Bronze Age Egypt the labor of a small fraction of the population would have sufficed to nourish all. Aside from services, an agrarian economy cannot expand employment much. Increasing productivity is counter-productive and none of the wealthy agrarian economies grew organically into an industrial economy. Govert van Driel pointed out that in agrarian ancient Mesopotamia there was no place for the market or silver, although both were present (as is claimed for Egypt). Overcapacity, trade, underemployment, and finance allow an understanding of the ancient economies, economics and economic growth; the impact of using modern economic thought based on production (and not economic behavior and activity) results in a flawed theory that must be revised.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra von Lieven

Abstract Within the Ancient Egyptian temple, science was an important occupation for certain specialized priests. Two fields particularly well documented are astronomy and astrology on the one hand, and medicine on the other. For the medical practitioners, namely the Sakhmet priest and the Leader of Serqet, there are even special manuals for their use attested. The paper presents some of the evidence and discusses it within its cultural context.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Esma Mania

The Caucasus is considered as one of the difficult geopolitical regions. It includes Georgia, which differs from other Caucasian ethnics in religious-cultural context. Georgia, which has been strongly influenced by Persia and Ottoman Turkey for centuries, as well as by Europe, fully becomes a part of Russian Empire and gets under even stronger European influence. The 19th century Caucasus was characterized by multiculturalism that, in general, causes the atrophy of values and the marginalization of national components, as a result. The subject of our research is the private archive, namely, 700 letters of Grigol Orbeliani (1804-1883), Georgian poet, military person and public figure, the General of the Russian army. In this material, we can find the various concepts of self-identity. In this regard, it is significant to analyze what place was taken by Russian on the one hand and Eastern on the other hand phraseology and sayings in his mentality. How does Orbeliani understand and develop the phenomenon of “homeland”; what forms of tolerance does he reveal; what is his perception on Imperial, Caucasian and Georgian contexts, and so on. These very letters give us the opportunity to find not only Orbelianian contours of self-identity concept, but contributes to our attempts of marking human groups and societies’ ethnic and religious identities as well.


1936 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. D. Clark

The history of the invasive movements associated with the diffusion of Deverel-Rimbury pottery during the Late Bronze Age in Britain can be studied from two main points of view. We may seek to discover the continental sources of the various components of the general complex, and in this way arrive at the origins of the movement and its chronology in terms of continental cultures; or we may adopt the less spectacular, if no less interesting, course, and see what can be learnt of the impact of the alien on the indigenous culture of the period in Britain. As Dr. Curwen's work on the Plumpton Plain site in Sussex has demonstrated, in conjunction with Mr. Hawkes's analysis of the pottery, the continental affinities of the Deverel-Rimbury folk are best studied within an area of primary diffusion. The mutual relations of the invasive and the indigenous folk, can, on the contrary, be appreciated most easily by working on sites peripheral to the Deverel-Rimbury distribution, such as the one in Mildenhall Fen, West Suffolk, to which attention is drawn in this paper (fig. 1).


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-183
Author(s):  
Vladan Jovanovic

From the perspective of lexicography, this paper presents an analysis of participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i), which in contemporary Serbian language fall within two categories: 1) the category of contemporary participial continuants, whose action is attributed to the noun as a temporary, current feature at a definite point in time, and 2) the category of adjectives that semantically correspond to past participles or to adjectives proper. As regards the descriptive dictionaries of the contemporary Serbian language, the participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i) are lexicographically treated primarily in the Dictionary of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (the SASA Dictionary). Comparing the example sentences excerpted from various texts belonging to the contemporary standard Serbian language, on the one hand, with those excerpted from the SASA Dictionary, on the other, it can be noted that the SASA Dictionary does not contain examples of participle forms with the reflexive morpheme -se, while they can be said to be confirmed in other sources. This can be explained as resulting from the impact of the Serbian language norm, according to which participles do not belong to the contemporary standard Serbian language. This is especially true of forms containing the reflexive morpheme -se, which are not to be found in any modern grammar of the standard Serbian language. It is concluded in the paper that the SASA Dictionary treats the participle forms of both aforementioned categories and of three separate participle forms according to the verb tense (past and present) and voice (active and passive). As for the sources confirming the use of these forms, they can be found not only in those dating from the first half of the 19th century, when participles were commonplace in the literary language of Serbs, but also in the works of the 20th-century authors using the contemporary standard Serbian language. In accordance with that, the conclusion to be drawn is that participles should be treated and included in dictionaries, both in those whose compilation is ongoing (i.e. the SASA Dictionary) and in the future dictionaries of the contemporary Serbian language. The excerpted material shows that participles are used by prominent authors in Serbian science, religion and culture. As for the issue of which label to use for the indicated types of participles in the descriptive dictionary of the contemporary Serbian language, it is argued in this paper that in order to resolve it one should take into consideration at least two sets of facts related to the presented material. One refers to the examples of the formation of participles that in fact originate from the older layers of our literary language and which have been preserved in identical or similar form to this day (e.g. odsedsi, usopsi), while the other concerns participles created in a contemporary synchronic process involving contemporary verbs in current use and their meanings (dogorevajuca sveca, plac radjajucih stvorenja, etc.). The former set of examples is marked with standard labels, such as ?zast.? (?obsolete?), ?arh.? (?archaic?), ?rsl.? (?Russian Church Slavonic?), ?csl.? (?New Church Slavonic?), ?ssl.? (?Serbian Church Slavonic?), ?stknj. arh.? (?from earlier literary sources, old-fashioned?), used in the lexicographic description of participles in the SASA Dictionary, which can also be used in other descriptive dictionaries of the contemporary Serbian language to indicate the literary epoch in which a particular form of participle originated, or its pragmatic value. Concerning the latter set of participles, if they were to be introduced into a descriptive dictionary of the Serbian language, they would require different labels, since these are the words formed according to the participle-building pattern of the present-day synchronic lexical-grammatical process.


1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
John A Atkinson ◽  
Camilla Dickson ◽  
Jane Downes ◽  
Paul Robins ◽  
David Sanderson

Summary Two small burnt mounds were excavated as part of the programme to mitigate the impact of motorway construction in the Crawford area. The excavations followed a research strategy designed to address questions of date and function. This paper surveys the various competing theories about burnt mounds and how the archaeological evidence was evaluated against those theories. Both sites produced radiocarbon dates from the Bronze Age and evidence to suggest that they were cooking places. In addition, a short account is presented of two further burnt mounds discovered during the construction of the motorway in Annandale.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 451-459
Author(s):  
Ashraf Yehia El-Naggar ◽  
Mohamed A. Ebiad

Gasoline come primarily from petroleum cuts, it is the preferred liquid fuel in our lives. Two gasoline samples of octane numbers 91 and 95 from Saudi Arabia petrol stations were studied. This study was achieved at three different temperatures 20oC, 30oC and 50oC representing the change in temperatures of the different seasons of the year. Both the evaporated gases of light aromatic hydrocarbons (BTEX) of gasoline samples inside the tank were subjected to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively via capillary gas chromatography. The detailed hydrocarbon composition and the octane number of the studied gasoline samples were determined using detailed hydrocarbon analyzer. The idea of research is indicating the impact of light aromatic compounds in gasoline on the toxic effect of human and environment on the one hand, and on octane number of gasoline on the other hand. Although the value of octane number will be reduced but this will have a positive impact on the environment as a way to produce clean fuel.


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