Kate Smith

R. B. Parkinson

Max Carocci

How old is the oldest chat-up line between men? Who was the first lesbian? Were ancient Greek men who had sex together necessarily gay? And what did Shakespeare think about cross-dressing? A Little Gay History takes objects ranging from Ancient Egyptian papyri and the erotic scenes on the Roman Warren Cup to images by modern artists including David Hockney and Bhupen Khakhar to consider questions such as these. Explored are the issues behind forty artefacts from ancient times to the present, and from cultures across the world, to ask a question that concerns us all: how easily can we recognize love in history?

Desire and Diversity Across the World

A Little Gay History

This anthology contains all the substantial surviving works from the golden age of Ancient Egyptian fictional literature (c.1940-1640 B.C.). Composed by an anonymous author in the form of a funerary autobiography, the Tale tells how the courtier Sinuhe flees Egypt at the death of his king. His adventures bring wealth and happiness, but his failure to find meaningful life abroad is only redeemed by the new king's sympathy, and he finally returns to the security of his homeland. Other works from the Middle Kingdom include a poetic dialogue between a man and his soul on the problem of suffering and death, a teaching about the nature of wisdom which is bitterly spoken by the ghost of the assassinated King Amenemhat I, and a series of light-hearted tales of wonder from the court of the builder of the Great Pyramid."--Jacket

The Tale of Sinuhe

[Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt] certainly represents a landmark. It is the first monograph devoted to an integral study and interpretation of the entire corpus of literature preserved from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.'Joachim Quack, Professor of Egyptology, University of Heidelberg.

A Dark Side to Perfection

Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt

Documents the history of homosexuality and its representation in art, using objects from the British Museum's collection that date from 9000 BC to the present to illustrate how same-sex love has always been a part of human history.

The book provides a commentary on one of the best known poems from the Middle Kingdom, The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, from c. 1840 BC. An introduction covers issues of composition and reception in the Middle Kingdom; language and imagery; naturalism, artifice and immediacy; cultural themes; and later and modern receptions. The commentary includes the text in transliteration and translation with a line by line commentary discussing points of philology, lexicography, style, intertext, context, meaning and possible emotional and aesthetic impact. The volume is intended to assist anyone wishing to read the poem in its original language, and is laid out with text and commentary on the same page to enable an integrated experience of reading, following the precedent of other academic commentaries on classic works of world literature. Figures are included to help embed the poem in its material culture and landscape. An index of words is also provided. The book complements the existing text edition of the poem and the new photographic publications of the main manuscripts by the author.

A Reader's Commentary

The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant

This is one of the masterpieces from the golden age of Egyptian literature in the Middle Kingdom. Although the Tale has been much studied and quoted, there has never been a full parallel edition of the manuscripts. This volume fills that gap and provides a standard text to serve as a basis for future research. For the edition of the Egyptian text, Richard Parkinson has collated the transcriptions with the original papyri in Berlin and London, and proposes a number of new and improved readings. The textual notes supply facsimiles of problematic passages, offer restorations for damaged sections, and record the variant readings of previous scholars. The introduction describes the four manuscripts and discusses their date and provenance. Richard Parkinson constructs the first stemma for the textual tradition of the Tale, as well as presenting a history and bibliography of previous studies.

In Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry, Richard Parkinson explores how ancient Egyptian poems have been read and perceived across the ages. Presents an innovative and theoretically-informed account of how the most famous ancient Egyptian poems have been read over 4,000 years From a leading expert in the interpretation of ancient Egyptian literature Explores the original experience of ordinary Egyptians enjoying the poems as well as their interpretation during the Middle Kingdom and up to modern times Draws on recent discoveries in the British Museum archives to reconstruct the contexts of the poems

Among Other Histories

Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry

"The paintings from Nebamun's tomb chapel are among the greatest and most famous of the British Museum's treasures. Yet much about them remains mysterious, and this book is concerned with the detective work undertaken to help us to understand and see them properly before they are displayed in a new permanent gallery in 2008. For this the paintings are being conserved and remounted in the Museum's specialist laboratories, a process that is revealing radical new information about painting techniques in ancient Egypt. This, together with archival work, is helping us to solve the problem of the tomb-chapel's location at Thebes, last seen in the 1820s when the paintings were removed."--Museum website.

The Painted Tomb-chapel of Nebamun

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most popular artefacts in the British Museum. Containing a decree written in Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphics, it proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. This concise study traces the history of `the most famous piece of rock in the world' to become a modern icon and tells the story of the race to use it to decipher Egypt's ancient script by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Also includes a translation of the text.

The Rosetta Stone

Ute Wartenberg

Stephen Quirke

Bridget Leach

One of the most remarkable inventions of ancient Egypt was the making of paper from the papyrus plant. As early as 3000 BC sheets and rolls of papyrus provided an ideal surface for writing with reed pen and cakes of carbon black and red ochre pigment. Egyptian scribes used papyrus for administrative records, legal documents and letters of business and personal life. Equally important for our understanding of ancient Egypt, papyrus was used to record literary texts as well as compendia of knowledge such as the famous Rhind mathematical papyrus. Religious hymns and litanies are recorded, as are the great collections of formulae to secure life after death, the Book of the Dead.

Papyrus

Mary Fischer

Whitfield Diffie

R. S. Simpson

Napoleon's troops discovered a granitoid slab in the village of Rosetta in the western Delta in 1799. The Rosetta Stone was to become one of the most famous Egyptian antiquities in the world as well as an instantly recognizable icon of script and decipherment. In this exciting, beautifully illustrated work, Richard Parkinson tells the story of the Stone's discovery and the so-called battle of the decipherers that it inspired. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the British Museum celebrating the bicentenary of the Stone's discovery, and including a selective catalog of the exhibits, this book also examines the wider issues of script and writing in ancient Egypt and beyond. The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a stela inscribed with a priestly decree in honor of Ptolemy V. The main significance of the text lies not in its content, however, but in the fact that it is written in three scripts--hieroglyphic, demotic, and ancient Greek. Early Orientalists recognized immediately the potential of the Stone for the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Thomas Young made great advances, especially with the demotic text, but it was Jean-Fran�ois Champollion who made the final breakthrough in 1822. In so doing he cracked much more than two Egyptian scripts: He opened up Egyptian culture as a whole to historians. Among the subjects discussed in Cracking Codes are the relationship between hieroglyphs and art, the social prestige of literacy, and the power of writing and its practical aspects (scribal equipment and training). A brief description of other decipherments is also given, drawing on examples such as Linear B and Meroitic--a language which remains to be read. A selection of the History Book Club, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the Quality Paperback Book Club

The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment

Cracking Codes

Voices from Ancient Egypt is an anthology presenting translations of sixty documents from a golden age of ancient Egyptian culture (c. 2081 - 1600 BC). The documents illustrate all aspects of life and the place of literacy in an early civilisation. The 'voices' range from the high formal literature of religious rituals and royal monuments to the hurried requests of the bureaucrats and the jokes of harrassed workmen. They tell a tale not only of the intellectual beliefs of the elite, but of family feuds, love and murder, as well as the pastoral dreams of a society trying to attain its vision of absolute order in a chaotic universe. This volume is a reissue of the valuable introduction to ancient Egyptian literature, first published in 1991.

R. B. Parkinson

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