Product Description
Synopsis
This is the first comprehensive study of sex in ancient Egypt. It considers sex in its broadest sense, analysing not only the sexual practices of individual people but also the ways in which sexual activity was indivisibly woven into a fabric of social and communal life. The main sources are the innumerable private documents written in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period, and almost miraculously preserved by the dry climate. All types of document are used in the book, from magic spells for winning over a lover to judicial accounts of sexual crimes, many of them translated into English here for the first time. From these fragments, a world has been reconstructed in which real people move and function as, sexual beings. Yet the Egyptian sources for sex are much more than fare for the historical-voyeur. They have a great deal to say about the construction of sexuality in the ancient world, about notions of the self and the sexual self, and the ways that people inhabited their bodies.
