Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Egyptian Book Culture

What is it about?

This paper serves to reevaluate our understanding of what are books, challenging modern beliefs influenced by Western bias so that Egyptology can better incorporate the topic of books and bibliography in scholarship. After drawing upon frameworks and models from the fields of Book History and Library Science, ancient Egyptian literary works found on stone are then used as examples to solidify the need to understand books first as ideas, and second, as ideas which can then take a physical form.

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Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash

Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash

Why is it important?

By understanding books as ideas, as an intellectual work, rather than just as objects adhering to specific physical characteristics, it allows "book" to not be an anachronistic term in Egyptology (and other disciplines that study ancient cultures). Advocating use of the term more loosely in scholarship will ultimately allow for the creation of new forms of communication between scholars of textual, art, and archaeological/material culture studies within and outside the field, expanding both immaterial and material understandings of pictorial and textual literary objects.