Living with the Dead - Ancestor Worship and Mortuary Ritual in Ancient Egypt
By Nicola Harrington
Oxbow Books | December 2012 | ISBN-10: 1842174932 | PDF | xvi+208 pages | 38.6 mb 
http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/living-with-the-dead.html

Living with the Dead presents a detailed analysis of ancestor worship in Egypt, using a diverse range of material, both archaeological and anthropological, to examine the relationship between the living and the dead. Iconography and terminology associated with the deceased reveal indistinct differences between the blessedness and malevolence and that the potent spirit of the dead required constant propitiation in the form of worship and offerings. A range of evidence is presented for mortuary cults that were in operation throughout Egyptian history and for the various places, such as the house, shrines, chapels and tomb doorways, where the living could interact with the dead. The private statue cult, where images of individuals were venerated as intermediaries between people and the Gods is also discussed. Collective gatherings and ritual feasting accompanied the burial rites with separate, mortuary banquets serving to maintain ongoing ritual practices focusing on the deceased. Something of a contradiction in attitudes is expressed in the evidence for tomb robbery, the reuse of tombs and funerary equipment and the ways in which communities dealt with the death and burial of children and others on the fringe of society. This significant study furthers our understanding of the complex relationship the ancient Egyptians had with death and with their ancestors; both recently departed and those in the distant past.

About the Author 
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Nicola is an Egyptologist who joined the University in January 2013 as a University of Sydney Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She is the author of Living with the dead: ancestor worship and mortuary ritual in ancient Egypt (2013), and contributed to Jean L. Keith’s Anthropoid busts of Deir el-Medina: catalogue raisonne (2011), as well as writing catalogue and dictionary entries, articles on Predynastic and New Kingdom material, and abstracts for the Online Egyptological Bibliography. A former tutor and lecturer at the University of Oxford, Nicola is currently researching the representation sub-adults in the ancient world (c.1550 BC-30 BC) in collaboration with Dr Lesley Beaumont. The interdisciplinary research project will involve a comparative analysis of the iconographic, and to a lesser extent, archaeological, bio-anthropological and textual evidence in order to illuminate the social perception, status and experience of childhood in ancient Egypt and Greece

CONTENTS
List of fi gures and tables ..... vii
Introduction .... ix
Acknowledgements .... xii
Timeline ....xiii
Maps ..... xv
CHAPTER 1: The Nature of the Deceased: Constituent Parts, Character, and Iconography ....1
CHAPTER 2: The cult of the ancestors ....28
CHAPTER 3: Places of interaction with the dead ....65
CHAPTER 4: Times of interaction between the living and the dead: funerals, festivals, and banquets ....103
CHAPTER 5: Attitudes to the dead ....124
CHAPTER 6: Conclusions: living with the dead in ancient Egypt ....146
Bibliography......151
Index .....197