Assassin’s Creed Origins: Video Games as Time Machines
Ancient Egypt is far away. Very far away. For too many scholars who study Egypt professionally, it is far away in space. For all of us, it is far away in time—around two thousand years at the nearest point. This distance has consequences. We tend to view the world of ancient Egypt as we would a city...
| Published in: | Near Eastern archaeology |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Chicago Press
[2021]
|
| In: |
Near Eastern archaeology
|
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Game
/ Video recording
/ Egypt (Antiquity)
/ Peace
|
| RelBib Classification: | TC Pre-Christian history ; Ancient Near East |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Ancient Egypt is far away. Very far away. For too many scholars who study Egypt professionally, it is far away in space. For all of us, it is far away in time—around two thousand years at the nearest point. This distance has consequences. We tend to view the world of ancient Egypt as we would a city on a mountain top: We observe the buildings as amorphous shapes, the people as bug-like creatures moving about at random, the events that shape their lives as momentary flurries of activity. Deliberate study provides an alternative view. Through the telescopic lens of scholarship, individual moments come into focus, are magnified, and become real, but the whole remains an incomplete sum of its disconnected parts. To use a more-familiar metaphor, we modern scholars see either the texture of the bark or the blue-gray smudge of a distant forest (fig. 1). We have no choice but to miss the forest for the trees, we can never experience them together. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2325-5404 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Near Eastern archaeology
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1086/713365 |