Books: still not drowned edition
Jun. 10th, 2008 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI stayed very close to safety while swimming today. Oh yes indeed.
Books 2008: 78
78. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt (Michigan, 1990).
The paperback edition of a book first published in 1984, this is good, solid, social history dealing with the lives of women of varied status between the third and first centuries BCE. Queens, married women, and slaves and workers are treated of.
It's very readable, and I suspect its flaws - apart from the queens, the aristocracy does not seem to me to have been treated with the same degree of rigor as the non-aristocratic woman - stem from the lack of available evidence from Alexandria, seat of the aristocracy (with a climate not really suitable to the survival of papyrii). It's not a book for the novice, despite its readability: it assumes a significant familiarity with the period, with the result that I'm fairly sure I missed as much detail as I caught.
But it is really good history, for all that.
The book I would like to read next is a detailed examination of the social differences between late Dynastic Egypt, Hellenistic Egypt, and Roman Egypt, which traces their development through time. But, alas, I suspect that book is not yet written.
Egyptologists and Classicists don't seem to...talk? Let their disciplines inform each other that often, anyway.
Gym today. 25 mins on the treadmill, for 2 miles and change: mile in 9.5 mins. Weights, stretching. An hour in the library, trying not to snore while attempting to read about the University of Pennsylvania archaeological survey of the region around the site of Vrokastro, including the Istron valley, and I headed home for swimming.
Sleepy now.
Books 2008: 78
78. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt (Michigan, 1990).
The paperback edition of a book first published in 1984, this is good, solid, social history dealing with the lives of women of varied status between the third and first centuries BCE. Queens, married women, and slaves and workers are treated of.
It's very readable, and I suspect its flaws - apart from the queens, the aristocracy does not seem to me to have been treated with the same degree of rigor as the non-aristocratic woman - stem from the lack of available evidence from Alexandria, seat of the aristocracy (with a climate not really suitable to the survival of papyrii). It's not a book for the novice, despite its readability: it assumes a significant familiarity with the period, with the result that I'm fairly sure I missed as much detail as I caught.
But it is really good history, for all that.
The book I would like to read next is a detailed examination of the social differences between late Dynastic Egypt, Hellenistic Egypt, and Roman Egypt, which traces their development through time. But, alas, I suspect that book is not yet written.
Egyptologists and Classicists don't seem to...talk? Let their disciplines inform each other that often, anyway.
Gym today. 25 mins on the treadmill, for 2 miles and change: mile in 9.5 mins. Weights, stretching. An hour in the library, trying not to snore while attempting to read about the University of Pennsylvania archaeological survey of the region around the site of Vrokastro, including the Istron valley, and I headed home for swimming.
Sleepy now.
