Ramesside Inscriptions: Historial & Biographical. Volume V

Kenneth A. Kitchen


The aim of Professor Kenneth Kitchen’s magisterial Ramesside Inscriptions is simple—to make available the principal historical and biographical texts of the Ramesside age (c.1300–1070 bc) in a comprehensive, compact and accurate edition that should be comprehensive but handy to use. It does not, however, include purely literary, ritual and funerary texts. This book presents the hieroglyphic texts from the reigns of the ephemeral Setnakht (c.1189–1187 bc) and his son, Ramesses III (c.1187–1156 bc). It makes available both the ‘official’ and royal records issued or engraved in the king’s name, personifying (as he did) the effective government of ancient Egypt for his time, in addition to those left us by his subjects at all levels of society—from viziers and viceroys at the head of the royal administration (along with priesthoods and the military) down through society’s echelons to the workmen who laboured in the royal tombs in Western Thebes (based in the village of Deir el-Medina), and the humble folk that served them. For Deir el-Medina, both collective (‘official’) records and the mementos of individuals and families have been kept together, not to split up data that in effect belong together. First published in eighteen individual fascicles between 1970 and 1983 by B. H. Blackwell (Oxford), this volume is re-printed here for the first time in a single, handsome, book.


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Imprint: Abercromby Press

ISBN: 978 1 912246 20 5

Pages: xxiii + 674

Format: Hardback

Published: 8/1/2023

Copyright: 2023