Leslie Anne Warden, Ceramic Perspectives on Ancient Egyptian Society (Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2021. doi:10.1017/9781108881487
The fifth volume of Ancient Egypt in Context series has just been published.
The series, edited by Gianluca Miniaci (Università di Pisa), Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia (CNRS–Paris), Anna Stevens (University of Monash/University of Cambridge), is published by the Cambridge University Press within the frame of Cambridge Elements.
The latest Element, Ceramic Perspectives on Ancient Egyptian Society by Leslie Anne Warden (Roanoke College), demonstrates how ceramics, a dataset that is more typically identified with chronology than social analysis, can forward the study of Egyptian society writ large.
This Element argues that the sheer mass of ceramic material indicates the importance of pottery to Egyptian life. Ceramics form a crucial dataset with which Egyptology must critically engage, and which necessitate working
with the Egyptian past using a more fluid theoretical toolkit. This Element will demonstrate how ceramics may be employed in social analyses through a focus on four broad areas of inquiry: regionalism; ties between province
and state, elite and non-elite; domestic life; and the relationship of political change to social change. While the case studies largely come from the Old through Middle Kingdoms, the methods and questions may be applied to any period of Egyptian history.
This Element is free online until 8th June at the following URL:
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