Maria Cannata, Three Hundred Years of Death: The Egyptian
Funerary Industry in the Ptolemaic Period (Culture and
History of the Ancient Near East, 110), Brill, 2020. Hb,
814 pp. ISBN: 978 90 04 40679 7.
The book provides a detailed survey of the organisation of
the necropolises and the funerary workers, as well as their
role in the practical aspects of the mummification, funeral,
burial, and mortuary cult of the deceased, in Ptolemaic
Egypt (332-30 BC). The author gathers together and synthesises
hundreds of the original textual sources, as well as the
relevant archaeological sources, on the organisation of the
funerary industry and its practitioners, revealing important
regional and chronological variations overlooked in studies
focusing on a limited geographical area, a shorter timeframe,
or a smaller group of documents.
