Pharaoh's Land and Beyond: Ancient Egypt and Its Neighbors

The concept of pharaonic Egypt as a unified, homogeneous, and isolated cultural entity is misleading. Ancient Egypt was a rich tapestry of social, religious, technological, and economic interconnections among numerous cultures from disparate lands. This volume uniquely examines Egypt's relationship with its wider world through fifteen chapters arranged in five thematic groups. The first three chapters detail the geographical contexts of interconnections through examination of ancient Egyptian exploration, maritime routes, and overland passages. The next three chapters address the human principals of association: peoples, with the attendant difficulties differentiating ethnic identities from the record; diplomatic actors, with their complex balances and presentations of power; and the military, with its evolving role in pharaonic expansion. Natural events, too, played significant roles in the pharaonic world: geological disasters, the effects of droughts and floods on the Nile, and illness and epidemics all delivered profound impacts, as is seen in the third section. Physical manifestations of interconnections between pharaonic Egypt and its neighbors in the form of objects are the focus of the fourth set: trade, art and architecture, and a specific case study of scarabs. The final section discusses in depth perhaps the most powerful means of interconnection: ideas. Whether through diffusion and borrowing of knowledge and technology, through the flow of words by script and literature, or through exchanges in the religious sphere, the pharaonic Egypt that we know today was constantly changing-and changing the cultures around it.