Living in the past

Living in the past is the phenomenon that underlies this study, which focuses on the causes of the Egyptian archaizing spirit that reached its climax under the Saite Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (664-525 B.C.), resurrecting elements from earlier stages of Egyptian civilization. These elements, which had long since fallen out of use (hence the term 'archaism,' rather than 'tradition' or 'continuity'), include everything from earlier stages of the language to artistic styles and motifs, and to funerary practices.

Both royal and private documents are analyzed, as the book attempts to answer the 'why' of the archaizing movement in general by concentrating on the 'how,' that is, the mechanism of the written historical and biographical sources.

The study is divided into three parts. Part I covers general questions concerning Salte archaism as a whole, such as the wide variety of epigraphic and orthographic features of the texts of this period, and the question of Saite 'copies,' gathering examples of both scenes and texts which seem to hark back to specific earlier monuments for inspiration.

The second part provides a grammatical analysis of both the royal and private texts in the corpus, including a morphological attempt to organize the verbal system of Saite secular Egyptian. The third part allows a detailed look at the royal historical stelae of Dynasty 26. Eight royal historical inscriptions are gathered for the first time with exhaustive critical apparatus including new photographs, facsimile drawings, computer-generated hieroglyphic copies for textbook use, transliteration, translation and commentary.

A royal text hieroglyphic index of all words occurring in these stelae is also included.