Amanda–Alice Maravelia, Les Astres dans les Textes Religieux en Égypte Antique et dans les Hymnes Orphiques. BAR International Series 1527. Oxford, Archaeopress, 2006, pp. xiv + 638; 72 figures and tables. Indices, including Egyptian terms. In French, with summaries in English, Greek and German. ISBN 1841719641. £70.00.

Abstract

Abstract: Amanda–Alice Maravelia’s new volume in the BAR series is an ambitious and impressive archaeoastronomical comparison of celestial ideas in Egyptian religious thought with the Orphic Hymns from ancient Greece. Maravelia is uniquely poised to make this contribution to Egyptology: holding two doctorates, one in Egyptology and one in astronomy, the author has combined her interests into a readable and edifying look at the evolution of Egyptian astronomical thought and its “unique and fertile” synergy with archaeology. This work is the publication of her Ph.D. thesis (in Egyptology) for the University of Limoges. One of the subfields of postprocessual archaeology, exemplified by Maravelia, is cognitive archaeology: not only to understand the material culture of the ancients, but also to understand what they perceived as their taxonomy of the world around them. In essence, how did they think? Astronomy is one of the best starting points in this sense. How did the ancients view the stars, what significance did they assign them based on what they saw, and how did this impact their lives?