DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Fayum Landscape

Ten Thousand Years of Archaeology, Texts, and Traditions in Egypt

Claire Malleson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The American University in Cairo Press

Published:30th Jan '19

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Fayum Landscape cover

A fascinating survey of changing perceptions of the Fayum landscape from 7500 BC to the early twentieth century

Located some one hundred kilometers southwest of Cairo, the Fayum region has long been regarded as unique, often described in terms that conjure up images of an idealized Garden of Eden. In The Fayum Landscape Claire Malleson takes a novel approach to the study of the region by exploring the ways in which people have, through millennia, perceived and engaged with the Fayum landscape. Distinguishing between the experienced landscape of state and bureaucratic record and the imagined landscape of myth, meaning, and observers’ personal influences and expectations, Malleson questions in detail where those perceptions come from. She traces religious practices, follows the tracks of myths and traditions, and investigates the roots of stories found in texts from the pharaonic, classical, and Medieval Islamic periods. She also reviews many, more recent travel writings on the region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The work of each author is presented in its historical and cultural context, and Malleson integrates what is known about ancient activities in the Fayum, based on the archaeological evidence from the many monuments and ancient settlements that exist in the region. Scholars and students of archaeology and landscape studies as well as general readers interested in Egypt’s history and archaeology will find this book highly engaging and enlightening.

"Clare Malleson’s thorough and detailed piece is a tour de force, covering, as it does, the whole sweep of its history from the Palaeolithic period right up to modern times."—Hilary Forrest, Ancient Egypt Magazine

ISBN: 9789774168833

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

340 pages