Cultural Memory and Early Civilization

Jan Assmann is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg and an Honorary Professor at the University of Konstanz. He has published forty-five monographs, including, most recently, The Price of Monotheism (2009), Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel and the Rise of Monotheism (2008), Religion and Cultural Memory (2006) and Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt.

• Introduction; Part I. The Theoretical Basis: 1. Memory culture; 2. Written culture; 3. Cultural identity and political imagination; Part II. Case Studies: 4. Egypt; 5. Israel and the invention of religion; 6. The birth of history from the spirit of the law; 7. Greece and disciplined thinking; Cultural memory: a summary.

'Jan Assmann's work on cultural memory is essential for notions of memory and memorialization. I know of no modern scholarly study on collective memory and aspects relating to it, from Thucydides to modern Israel, from Genesis to modern Germany, that has not in some form drawn on Jan Assmann's theories on the relation between collective and cultural memory. In short, this book is an absolute classic, and will be invaluable to English-speaking scholars.' Susanna Elm, University of California, Berkeley