Author: Pavel Onderka
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788070366042
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Rogerio Sousa
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789252652
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Egyptian coffins stand out in museum collections for their lively and radiant appearance. As a container of the mummy, coffins played a key role by protecting the body and, at the same time, integrating the deceased in the afterlife. The paramount importance of these objects and their purpose is detected in the ways they changed through time. For more than three thousand years, coffins and tombs had been designed to assure in the most efficient way possible a successful outcome for the difficult transition to the afterlife. This book examines eight non-royal tombs found relatively intact, from the plains of Saqqara to the sacred hills of Thebes. These almost undisturbed burial sites managed to escape ancient looters and so their discoveries, from Mariette’s exploration of the Mastaba of Ti in Saqqara to Schiaparelli’s discovery of the Tomb of Kha and Merit in Deir el-Medina, were sensational events in Egyptian archaeology. Each one of these sites unveils before our eyes a time capsule, where coffins and tombs were designed together as part of a social, political and religious order. From Predynastic times to the decline of the New Kingdom, this book explores each site revealing the interconnection between mummification practices, coffin decoration, burial equipment, tomb decoration and ritual landscapes. Through this analysis, the author aims to point out how the design of coffins changed through time in order to empower the deceased with different visions of immortality. By doing so, the study of coffins reveals a silent revolution which managed to open to ordinary men and women horizons of divinity previously reserved for the royal sphere. Coffins thus show us how identity was forged to create an immortal and divine self.

Author: Juliana Dresvina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350150088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This collection uncovers the wives, daughters, mothers, companions and female assistants who laboured in the shadows of famous men. Revealing the reality of uncredited female contributions throughout history, this book highlights the work of neglected and forgotten women associated with celebrated male writers, scholars, activists and politicians. As the #ThanksforTyping movement has shown, anonymous women working to support the work of their male relations and colleagues has been, and often still is, a universal phenomenon. These essays show just how long intelligent and determined women have been sidelined, ignored or forgotten throughout history. From a well-connected Roman matrician to the mother of the poet Philip Larkin, these women have their voices returned to them in twenty engaging chapters. Spanning ancient times to the modern day, they return agency to women who occupied crucial roles behind the scenes, but were always restricted to the supporting role they were obliged to play. The universal importance of these women take on new meaning in our modern era where women's voices are becoming ever-louder and increasingly recognised - including through such a movement as #ThanksforTyping.

Author: Kenneth E. Spaeth Jr.
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303040398X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This book explores the importance of soil health in croplands, rangelands, pasturelands, and gardens, and presents new methods and technologies for assessing soil dynamics and health in these different land types. Through perspectives of agriculture, soil management, and ecological sustainability, the book provides accurate and up-to-date information on soil health assessment and maintenance that is often missing from current literature on conservation and environmental management and preservation. The book is written in a clear and concise format, and will appeal to non-scientists interested in soil health, as well as professional farmers, ranchers and gardeners. The book begins by discussing soil health from a historical perspective, and in terms of how it is covered in the news currently. Then the author addresses the ecological implications of soil health in farming, ranching and gardening, and comprehensively details the physical, chemical and biological properties of soil as they apply in various land types. The book then examines soil health assessment using new diagnostic and analytic technologies, and how these new innovations will be necessary going forward to maintain and improve soil health.

Author: Ana Kučan
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3035626561
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Never before had the garden to fulfil so many demands as it does today. It is a refuge from digitalised life and acts as a bridge to nature. As a man-made place where plants grow, it is cultivated and untamable at the same time. While for centuries the gardener's ambition was to control and subjugate nature, today it serves more as a place for retreat, a possible surrogate for wilderness, a habitat for animals or it fulfils the dream of self-sufficiency. In this book, landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, philosophers and historians illuminate different aspects of the garden in the Anthropocene in six chapters: the garden as a place of community, garden as art, garden as a place of enchantment and rapture, opening up questions of what garden as a model could stand for.

Author: Annette Giesecke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350259276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A Cultural History of Plants in Antiquity covers the period from 10,000 BCE to 500 CE. This period witnessed the transition from hunter-gatherer subsistence to the practice of agriculture in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and culminated in the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of the Han Dynasty in China, the rise of Byzantium, and the first flowering of Mayan civilization. Human uses for and understanding of plants drove cultural evolution and were inextricably bound to all aspects of cultural practice. The growth of botanical knowledge was fundamental to the development of agriculture, technology, medicine, and science, as well as to the birth of cities, the rise of religions and mythologies, and the creation of works of literature and art. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants. Annette Giesecke is Professor of Classics at the University of Delaware, USA. Volume 1 in the Cultural History of Plants set. General Editors: Annette Giesecke, University of Delaware, USA, and David Mabberley, University of Oxford, UK.

Author: Richard Mabey
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248771
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"Highly entertaining…Mabey gets us to look at life from the plants’ point of view." —Constance Casey, New York Times The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey. A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death. Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls “delightful and casually learned,” Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of the Garden of Eden; Newton’s apple and gravity, Priestley’s sprig of mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth’s daffodils; the history of cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America. Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural world.

Author: Naguib Kanawati
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Provides a much needed summary overview of the key elements of Egyptian tomb form, use and decoration over time. The tombs, with their scenes, inscriptions, objects and human remains, represent our richest source of information for the understanding of Egyptian beliefs and practices, art and architecture and of many aspects of daily life. Detailed, scholarly reports on individual cemeteries and tombs are abundant but in this fully illustrated, more general work, reproduced in this facsimile edition, Kanawati provides an invaluable introduction to, and overview of, the key elements of Egyptian tombs from Predynastic to the Late Period. The Egyptian dead enjoyed a continued existence in both the Netherworld and the land of the living – the individual possessing multiple entities that experienced different destinies after death. The tomb provided an everlasting earthly dwelling and consisted of a chapel above ground where the deceased’s cult was maintained and offerings presented, and a burial chamber for the body. Either or both could be richly decorated with paintings, reliefs and inscriptions. Kanawati describes and illustrates the principal forms and features of architecture and nature and subject matter of decoration and demonstrates how tomb design and decoration changed through time.

Author: Robert J. Muller
Publisher: Poesys Associates
ISBN: 1939386136
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1168

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Book Description
Murder, money, mystery, and metaphysics come together in a collection of riveting alternative-history thrillers. The Menmenet mysteries take place in a very different San Francisco colonized by the Egyptian Empire. A city of fog, temples, and mystery, Menmenet and the country of which it is the capital, the Ta'an-Imenty Republic, sit in an uneasy tension with the First Peoples' nations and the United States to the East. They get along well enough with the Aztec Republic to the south, but the Russians from Russkaya Amerika to the north are a constant source of trouble. Shesmu za-Akhen is a celebrity chef in Menmenet. Hutyt-er-Semetyu Cheryl MacIntyre is an emigrant from Boston in the United States trying to make her way in the homicide squad of the Menmenet medjau, the enforcers of ma'at. The trilogy of novels in the Menmenet Series tells their story. The Jackal of Inpu tells the story of how Shesmu and MacIntyre met, a romantic mystery full of murder and misplaced religiosity. In the second novel, The Lion of Bastet, the lovers follow the money amidst Aztec and Russian gangsters and temple priests dead set against them. The novel combines romance, police procedure, and religious conflict in a murder mystery that comes to a stunning conclusion. The third novel, The Bull of Mentju, takes Shesmu and MacIntyre far out of their comfort zones. Shesmu confronts the mystery of his missing father in the high mountains to the east, encountering First Peoples shamans and their gods, while MacIntyre confronts a more prosaic problem: the United States is mounting a secret attempt to take over the small country with genocidal intent. Ancient gods and modern armies clash in this military and political thriller. Enjoy all three novels in this box set of alternate history mysteries.

Author: Richard Mabey
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847654010
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
In The Cabaret of Plants, Mabey explores the plant species which have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty and belief. Picked from every walk of life, they encompass crops, weeds, medicines, religious gathering-places and a water lily named after a queen. Beginning with pagan cults and creation myths, the cultural significance of plants has burst upwards, sprouting into forms as diverse as the panacea (the cure-all plant ginseng, a single root of which can cost up to $10,000), Newton's apple, the African 'vegetable elephant' or boabab - and the mystical, night-flowering Amazonian cactus, the moonflower. Ranging widely across science, art and cultural history, poetry and personal experience, Mabey puts plants centre stage, and reveals a true botanical cabaret, a world of tricksters, shape-shifters and inspired problem-solvers, as well as an enthralled audience of romantics, eccentric amateur scientists and transgressive artists. The Cabaret of Plants celebrates the idea that plants are not simply 'the furniture of the planet', but vital, inventive, individual beings worthy of respect - and that to understand this may be the best way of preserving life together on Earth.