"In honor of the Oriental Institute's centennial celebration, this special edition guide to 100 select highlights of the collections of the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago presents objects from ancient Mesopotamia, Syro-Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Nubia, and Persia. The guide features a history of the collections, new photography, provenance information, and a brief description of each object"--

Emily Teter, research associate at the Institute, has selected 62 works from the over 25,000 in the Egyptian collection at the Oriental Institute at the U. of Chicago to provide the general reader and visitor with a sample of the breadth and significance of this little published collection. In addition to the royal portraits and relief sculpture commonly associated with Egyptian art, some more unusual works are included, such as lamps, grooming implements, and games. A history of the collection, especially the role of James Henry Breasted, begins the volume. A glossary, bibliography, map, chronology, and three indexes are included. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Hope for life after death is evidenced even in prehistoric times in Upper Egypt. The first written aids for attaining and supporting life in the hereafter were the Pyramid Texts inscribed within royal tombs towards the end of the Old Kingdom. In the Middle Kingdom, many texts were borrowed from the pyramid chambers and mingled with new spells; this new form, which today we call Coffin Texts, was usually written inside coffins. These eventually gave way to what we now know as the Book of the Dead. The collections of spells were usually written on rolls of papyrus, that is, in the form of an Egyptian book. Presented here are seventy Book of the Dead documents housed in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago. These documents, represented in whole or in part - all Eighteenth Dynasty or later - include seven papyri, three coffins, a shroud, a statuette, three stelae or similar and fifty-five ushabties. This is the first digital reprint of the 1960 publication.

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud. In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology. An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.

Discover how the ancient Egyptians controlled their immortal destiny! This book, edited by Foy Scalf, explores what the Book of the Dead was believed to do, how it worked, how it was made, and what happened to it.

The 173 texts contained in this volume were acquired by the Oriental Institute Tablet Collection over a long period of years from various sources. The texts are dated from 699 to 423 BC, during the Neo-Babylonian period. The more noteworthy subject matter of the texts includes an adoption document, sale of houses and a field (from the Nur-Sin archive), a "datio in solutum," a court protocol concerning a loan of silver with interest specified, a loan of silver with interest specified, proceedings in the assembly concerning personal status, a Mar Banutu text from the town of Hubat, a court record concerning the status of a freed person, a contract with fowlers to supply birds to Eanna, an inventory of the finery of the Lady-of-Uruk for craftsmen, a four-column list of precious objects, a two-column list of words, a tablet whose obverse records part of a contract and whose reverse is from Sb B, a fragment of an Akkadian religious text or medical or astrological commentary, and a fragment of a literary text. The book contains transliterations, translations, text notes, commentary, indices, and a mixture of hand-drawn copies and photographs of the tablets.

What do variables really tell us? When exactly do inventions occur? Why do we always miss turning points as they transpire? When does what doesn't happen mean as much, if not more, than what does? Andrew Abbott considers these fascinating questions in Time Matters, a diverse series of essays that constitutes the most extensive analysis of temporality in social science today. Ranging from abstract theoretical reflection to pointed methodological critique, Abbott demonstrates the inevitably theoretical character of any methodology. Time Matters focuses particularly on questions of time, events, and causality. Abbott grounds each essay in straightforward examinations of actual social scientific analyses. Throughout, he demonstrates the crucial assumptions we make about causes and events, about actors and interaction and about time and meaning every time we employ methods of social analysis, whether in academic disciplines, market research, public opinion polling, or even evaluation research. Turning current assumptions on their heads, Abbott not only outlines the theoretical orthodoxies of empirical social science, he sketches new alternatives, laying down foundations for a new body of social theory.