"This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition 'The Dawn of Egyptian Art' on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from April 10 to August 5, 2012"--T.p. verso.

An analytical bibliography that contains 7407 references, covering the Egyptian prehistory (palaeolithic, neolithic and predynastic) as well as the period of the first two dynasties.

Ever since the creation of the world's first botanical and zoological gardens five thousand years ago, people have collected, displayed, and depicted plants and animals from lands beyond their everyday experience. Some did so to demonstrate power over distant territories, others to enhance prestige by possessing something no one had seen before. Exotica also satisfied intellectual curiosity, furthered scientific research, and educated and entertained. In addition, exotica, especially their state-sponsored representation, were often instruments of political persuasion, and in turn exerted considerable influence over expansionist policies. More than an account of gardens and menageries from antiquity to the present, Strange and Wonderful explores the imagery of exotic flora and fauna in Western art, seeking answers to certain fundamental and universal questions. How do artists, schooled in traditional modes of rendering the familiar, deal with the new and strange? Why are rare species deliberately introduced into images otherwise devoid of the unusual? What is the pictorialized relationship between exotic reality and artistic imagination? Karen Polinger Foster takes readers on a journey across millennia and around the globe, telling fascinating stories and meeting along the way such characters as Hatshepsut's baboons, Charlemagne's elephant, Dürer's rhinoceros, and Victoria's hippopotamus. What emerges is a sense of just how strong and far-reaching the pull of the unknown and exotic has been across time and space. Ultimately, images of the wonderful reveal as much about the indigenous as they do about the strange, enabling us to glimpse more vividly the power of imagination to mold the unknown to its purposes. This dazzling and richly illustrated volume offers a thoughtful, much-needed inquiry into a very human phenomenon.

The book's central proposition is that the prominent feature of the hiero-glyphic script which Egyptologists call "determinatives" makes up an elabo-rate system of classifiers. All items of the lexicon take motivated pictorial classifiers. By this device, the script reflects the map of knowledgeorganization of ancient Egyptian culture. The book aims to reveal the principles and constraints governing the codification of the ancient Egyptian universe in this system. There is, to date, no comprehensive study, either in Egyptology or in cognitive linguistics, of the hieroglyphic classifiers as a structured system. The present work attempts to fill the existing hiatus by bridging the disciplines of Egyptology and cognitive studies, using the tools of the latter to elucidate the former and thus perhaps arrive at new perspectives on both. From the Egyptological angle, the book deals with the ancient Egyptians' nomenclature for "items in the world" and the relationship between lexicon and the knowledge organization. However, the events occurring in the picture-script render cognitive processes visible to our inspection hundreds of years before they have ripened into the Egyptian language. This "visibility" bears directly on a number of crucial questions in cognitive linguistics and ethnobiology. The book also includes an introduction to the hieroglyphic script.

Contributions by 34 scholars are brought together here to create a volume in honor of the long and fruitful career of Guenter Kopcke who is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Articles pertain to various topics on the ancient art, architecture, and archaeology of the greater Eastern Mediterranean region: from Pre-Dynastic Egypt to the Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolia, Cyprus and the Near East, and Etruscan Italy.