Old Kingdom Studies.com
A site dedicated to research about Old Kingdom Egypt
Ph.D. Thesis: The Cult of Re in the Old Kingdom
My Ph.D. thesis was a prosopographical study of 149 holders of titles in the cult of Re (Ra) in the Old Kingdom. It was submitted in March 2002, and I graduated in September 2002.
I am currently revising and expanding the thesis for publication. It appears here in its original, dissertation form with minor cosmetic changes in order to make it accessible to other scholars until the revision is complete. Posting it here is no different to it appearing in Theses Online, or UMI. I do intend to publish it. All rights are reserved.
I post it here because there has been an upsurge in interest in the Fifth Dynasty sun-temples over the last five years
since I submitted the thesis. Perhaps my work will be of some interest to those who are studying this period.
NB The title is a bit misleading. This is not a definitive study of the cult of Re. I ran out of time at the end of my Ph.D. candidature to change the title to something more descriptive. This will be addressed when the thesis is published as a book.
The following PDF files are Copyright © 2002 by Gaye Wilson, and may be downloaded for private use only.
They may not be commercially distributed or reproduced in quantity without written permission from the author.
Please direct any comments, corrections, or critiques to Gaye Wilson oldkingdomstudies @ gmail.com. (Remove the spaces between words.)
STOP PRESS 18th September 2008
I am having trouble converting my thesis files into pdf. I have used Inscribe for the hieroglyphs, but they are not converting as glyphs in the pdf. At the moment, I am going through the very laborious and not very satisfactory method of copying the glyphs into Adobe Illustrator, and converting them into a web image which is then copied and pasted back into the document. Unfortunately, this results in a low-resolution image.
If you have any ideas on how I can fix this problem, please email me at oldkingdomstudies @ gmail.com (remove the spaces to get the correct email address). As soon as this problem is fixed, the rest of my thesis will be uploaded.
UPDATE 4th October 2008
I have discovered that using Adobe Acrobat to convert my Word files into pdf garbles the hieroglyphs made using Inscribe. However, some experimentation afer a suggestion from someone on the EEF list led me to try it using ScanSoft PDF Create. This works beautifully, and the hieroglyphs are perfect. Now I can convert my thesis files into pdf format without messing around with images for the hieroglyphs. The rest of the thesis will be uploaded soon.
Front matter (pdf, 405 kb)
Contents (see Front matter)
Chapter 1: Introduction (pdf, 94 kb)
Chapter 2: The High Priesthood of Re
Chapter 3: Titles in the Sun-temple of Userkaf
Chapter 4: Titles in the Sun-temple of Neferirkare
Chapter 5: Titles in the Sun-temple of Neuserre
Chapter 6: The Minor Sun-temples
Chapter 7: Titles in the Cult of Re not associated with specific temples
Chapter 8: Conclusions
Chapter 9: Prosopography
Appendices
Bibliography