Thebes in the First Millennium BC

Book excerpt: Thebes in the First Millennium BC is a collection of articles, based mostly, but not entirely, on the talks given at the conference of the same name organised by the team of the South Asasif Conservation Project, an Egyptian-American Mission working under the auspices of the Ministry of State for Antiquities, Egypt, in Luxor in 2012. The organisers of the conference and editors of the volume, Elena Pischikova, Julia Budka, and Kenneth Griffin, brought together a group of prominent scholars to share and discuss the results of their recent field research in the tombs and temples of the Twenty-fifth – Twenty-sixth Dynasties in Thebes, Abydos, and Saqqara. This volume assembles current studies on royal and elite monuments of the Libyan, Kushite, and Saite Periods, and places them in a wider context. This volume investigates such aspects of research as tomb and temple architecture, burial assemblages, religious texts, paleography, artistic styles, iconography, local workshops, and archaism, providing a new perspective to the current scholarship and future exploration of these topics. The volume is further enriched by the inclusion of chapters on the conservation and preservation of monuments representing the present-day approach to the development of archaeological sites.