You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Passionate Curiosities explores the collections held in the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology through the lens of the people whose intellectual interests, financial backing, and social networks brought artifacts to Ann Arbor from the 1880s to the 1990s. Through purchases and expeditions, these individuals shaped the Museum's internationally recognized antiquities from the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, North Africa, Egypt, and the Near East, extensive photographic documentation of these regions from the early 1900s, and significant assemblages of early Christian and Islamic visual culture. An intriguing array of personalities--from archaeologists, missionaries, an...
The 1924-1935 University of Michigan excavations at the Graeco-Roman period Egyptian village of Karanis yielded thousands of artifacts and extensive archival records of their context. The Karanis material in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the University of Michigan Library Papyrology Collection forms a unique body of information for understanding life in an agricultural village in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. In 2011 and 2012, the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology presented the exhibition Karanis Revealed in two parts, using artifacts from the excavations and archival material to explore aspects of the site and its excavation in the 1920s and 1930s. As preparation for the exhibition progresse...
Karanis, a town in Egypt's Fayum region founded around 250 BC, housed a farming community with a diverse population and a complex material culture that lasted for hundreds of years. Ultimately abandoned and partly covered by the encroaching desert, Karanis eventually proved to be an extraordinarily rich archaeological site, yielding tens of thousands of artifacts and texts on papyrus that provide a wealth of information about daily life in the Roman-period Egyptian town. This volume tells of the history and culture of Karanis, and also provides a useful introduction to the University of Michigan's excavations between 1924 and 1935 and to the artifacts, archival records and photographs of the excavation that now form one of the major components of the collection of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.
The elaborately decorated coffin of Djehutymose, a priest of the ancient Egyptian god Horus from around 625-580 BC, is one of the central artifacts of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology's Egyptian collection. Using the images and texts from the coffin along with related artifacts in the Kelsey Museum, Egyptologist T. G. Wilfong explores what the coffin tells us about ancient Egyptian ideas of life, death, and the afterlife. We follow Djehutymose through his life as a priest, through his death, embalming, and afterlife, examining his gods and symbols as he undertakes a voyage into the afterlife. Finally we see how his coffin journeyed from ancient Egypt to modern Ann Arbor. This richly illustrated book serves as a general introduction to ancient Egyptian religion as well as a specialized study of a single Egyptian artifact in its wider contexts.
This catalogue documents an exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology on the mysterious ancient Egyptian jackal-headed gods associated with death and the afterlife. These gods are immediately identifiable symbols of ancient Egypt, but their specific identities and roles are often less well-known. Death Dogs is the first exhibition to examine their mysteries. The exhibition and catalogue focus on the three most important jackal gods: Anubis (embalmer and guide to the dead), Wepwawet (opener of the ways to the afterlife), and Duamutef (son of Horus, protector of the canopic jar). Jackal gods are represented by a variety of artifacts in the Kelsey Museum collection--statues, paintings, amu...
This is a catalogue of an exhibition by the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan which focused on a cycle of frescoes found in 1990 at the well-known villa on the outskirts of ancient Pompeii. Probably painted around 60 BC, the cycle depicts young women probably being initiated into the cult of Bacchus (Dionysus) in preparation for marriage. The catalogue presents a number of objects connected with the villa, as well as the reconstruction watercolours commissioned by Francis Willey Kelsey, founder of the museum, from Maria Barosso, an artist working in Rome at the time of the frescoes' discovery. Even more interesting are the ten essays that precede the artefacts, which focus on `women and cult in the art of Roman Italy' and have been developed out of a research group led by Gazda.
Catalogue of the exhibition held at Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Between 1964 and 1971, renowned Islamic art historian Oleg Grabar directed a large-scale archaeological excavation at the site of Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi. Drawn to the remote eighth-century complex in the hopes of uncovering a princely Umayyad palace, Grabar and his team instead stumbled upon a new type of urban settlement in the Syrian steppe. A rich lifeworld emerged in the midst of their discoveries, and over the course of the excavation's six seasons, close relationships formed between the American and Syrian archaeologists, historians, and workers who labored and lived at the site. Featuring previously unpublished documents and illustrating over fifty photographs from the Qasr al-Hayr dig, City in the Desert, Revisited recounts the personal experiences and professional endeavors that shaped the field of Islamic archaeology, art, and architectural history during the field's rise in the US academy.
This catalogue documents an exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology of watercolor paintings by American artist Wendy Artin and selected objects from the Museum's permanent collections. Wendy Artin has been working for over a decade on a series of watercolors of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and related subjects. She is thus a fresh presence in a long line of artists who draw inspiration from antiquity. Indeed, this tradition has very ancient precedents. The exhibition and catalogue place a selection of 47 of Artin's paintings--including landscapes and figure paintings as well as images of ancient sculptures--in dialogue with 14 objects drawn from the Kelsey's collections, among them works of Greek art inspired by Egyptian precedents, examples of Roman imperial portraits that were copied in numerous media for circulation around the empire, and reproductions of the same figure types featured in some of Artin's paintings (such as Aphrodite Rising from the Sea). Wendy Artin's masterful watercolors offer new and arresting ways of looking at ancient sculptures and buildings--and of remembering the classical past.