Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt

US: Princeton University Press, 2004. Paperback. Good. Much of the literature on ancient Egypt centers on pharaohs or on elite con ceptions of the afterlife. This scintillating book examines how ordinary an cient Egyptians lived their lives. Drawing on the remarkably rich and detai led archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence from some 450 years of the New Kingdom, as well as recent theoretical innovations from several fields, it reconstructs private and social life from birth to death. The re sult is a meaningful portrait composed of individual biographies, communiti es, and landscapes. Structured according to the cycles of life, the book relies on categories t hat the ancient Egyptians themselves used to make sense of their lives. Lyn n Meskell gracefully sifts the evidence to reveal Egyptian domestic arrange ments, social and family dynamics, sexuality, emotional experience, and att itudes toward the cadences of human life. She discusses how the Egyptians o f the New Kingdom constituted and experienced self, kinship, life stages, r eproduction, and social organization. And she examines their creation of co mmunities and the material conditions in which they lived. Also included is neglected information on the formation of locality and the construction of gender and sexual identity and new evidence from the mortuary record, incl uding important new data on the burial of children. Throughout, Meskell is careful to highlight differences among ancient Egyptians--the ways, for ins tance, that ethnicity, marital status, age, gender, and occupation patterne d their experiences. Readers will come away from this book with new insights on how life may have been experienced and conceived.