Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Living Forever: Self-Presentation in Ancient Egypt


Sun 08 Sep 2019 | 10:32 AM
NaDa Mustafa

Living Forever: Self-presentation in Ancient Egypt is a new book published by the American University in Cairo (AUC) press. It is considered Archaeologist Hussein Bassir’s latest masterpiece.

The book looks at how and why non-royal elites in ancient Egypt represented themselves, through language and art, on monuments, tombs, stelae, and statues, and in literary texts, from the Early Dynastic Period to the Thirtieth Dynasty.

Bringing together essays by international Egyptologists and archaeologists from a range of backgrounds, the chapters in this volume offer fresh insight into the form, content, and purpose of ancient Egyptian presentations of the self.

Applying different approaches and disciplines, they explore how these self-representations, which encapsulated a discourse with gods and men alike, yield rich historical and sociological information, provide examples of ancient rhetorical devices and repertoire, and shed light on notions of the self and collective memory in ancient Egypt.

 

Noteworthy, Hussein Bassir is an Egyptian archaeologist, novelist, and writer. In 1994, he got his BA in Egyptology from Cairo university. He got his MA and Ph.D in Near Eastern Studies from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.

He has held many positions at home and abroad. Bassir is also the author of several works of fiction in Arabic on ancient Egypt such as: In Search For Khnum, The Love in Tokyo and The Old Red Hippopotamus.

The novelist worked as a member of Dr Zahi Hawass’ archaeological team alongside Justin Ellis and Gregory Peters while participating in many archaeological excavations in sites all over Egypt.

He is currently the director of Egyptian antiquities museum, and Supervisor of Zahi Hawas Egyptology center at Bibliotheca Alexandria.