Bolshakov Andrey. Man and His Double in Egyptian Ideology of the Old Kingdom

Wiesbaden: Harrassowits Verlag, 1997. — 336 p.This book is devoted to the kA, one of the most significant categories applied by ancient Egyptians to describe the world and man in the world. Although the kA problem is of great importance for Egyptology, from the very beginning I did not intend to address my work solely to Egyptologists, but also to the historians of antiquity, archaeologists and anthropologists in general. There are two principle reasons for this. First of all, due to the specificity of the materials Egyptologists deal with, they approach the reconstruction of the Weltanschauung under study much nearer than any other historian studying ancient cultures can; thus an Egyptologist can give them a key to analogous reconstructions or, at least, provide them with comparative information of great importance. Assuming this task is a debt to be paid by Egyptology (that is still a highly self-isolated discipline) to other branches of history. I hope that this book could pay off some part of this debt, however little this part might be. Second, it should not be disre-
garded that the book was primarily aimed at Russian readers. Russia seems to be the last country where the process of specialization in humanitarian disciplines has not verged upon absurdity and where rather special works have a lot of readers among wide circles of intellectuals. When preparing the English edition, I did not want to revise the text radically, since it would have meant affecting the unity of special and more or less popular aspects reached with so much labor. Hence the peculiarities of the book, where many problems are exposed with more details than would be required for experts. I believe it will help any person who has no Egyptological education to read it without consulting specialist literature. I also tried to do my best disclosing the actual procedure of investigation thus enabling any reader to familiarize himself with the method of working with rather specific
Egyptian monuments. On the other hand, some problems are discussed in less detail than Egyptologists would have liked (especially in Chapters 1 and 9).