Three new books (free PDF) from the British Museum

Museums and archives are starting to make some of their scholarly publications and exhibit catalogs available as PDF download on the internet. This is a huge plus for scholars because the books in print are extraordinarily expensive and difficult to get. To date, most have been PDFs of things that have been out for a decade or more, but now they're starting to put out current material as well.

The biggest storehouse of these books is the Oriental Institute of Chicago, but other places are stepping up. The British Museum released three books earlier this month.

Tell Dafana Reconsidered: The Archaeology of an Egyptian Frontier Town (250 pages, with illustrations) Petrie thought that this town might be one of the most important centers for Greek and Egyptian interaction. It lies in a low and marshy area and is (or was) the first Egyptian town that travelers along the Mediterranean reached. Egyptologists are worried about the site because the land is now being turned to other uses (including fish farms) and artifacts are being thrown away or simply not reported.


The second one is " Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum Edited by Alexandra Fletcher, Daniel Antoine and JD Hill,2014" The British Museum has a lot of... well... human corpses lying around. This book talks about how they're curated and research on them... from bog bodies to Egyptian mummies to bones and more. This one's absolutely fascinating.

The third is Kom Firin II: The Urban Fabric and Landscape
edited by Neal Spencer, 2014 (probably the least interesting title they could have come up with.) This is the more recent excavation report of the town mentioned in the first publication. This talks about the older material found there, including artifacts from the New Kingdom and the era of Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great.)


Although these are "scholarly publications", the authors know how to write for Everybody Else - these books really are readable and interesting.

Great find!
I look forward to reading these in the near future.

a reply to: Byrd

Many thanks for the tips!

Going to be a good read, thanks for the links :-)