Author Description

English summary: How to date an idea? How to locate it in time and space without limiting its vital dynamic? Which possibilities do exist to communicate with old, foreign cultures without being tempted to discover ones own self? The task of this book is to answer these questions in a commensurable way, by a comprehensive study of the prominent but also controversial document of the Memphite Theology. The research took advantage of both, the theoretical concerns of the cultural studies as well as the traditional egyptological methods. The Memphite Theology was over and over again the object of philological research, but never before was it documented in total and studied in a way to answer the questions of the human sciences today. The aim of the thick description of this document, which is crucial for scholars of Egyptology and comparative religion, is to fill this gap. For instance, new insights of literary studies about the text-context-divide are applied to get a broadened perspective. Therefore the triumphal Stela of Piye, which is the best-known and most comprehensive textual source of the Kushite era, and which dates to the same period as the Memphite Theology, will be analyzed for the first time as a textualized context of the Memphite Theology. The circulation of power, hegemony, and cultural representations in the ancient Egyptian 25th Dynasty are illustrated to the reader in a dynamic manner by this pluralistic approach. German text. German description: Wie kann man eine Idee datieren? In Zeit und Raum einordnen, ohne dass ihre lebende Dynamik eingeschrankt wird? Welche Moglichkeiten gibt es, mit alten, fremden Kulturen in Kontakt zu treten, ohne in Versuchung zu geraten nur sich selbst zu finden? Dieses Buch nimmt sich zur Aufgabe exemplarisch anhand der Untersuchung des prominenten aber auch umstrittenen Denkmals Memphitischer Theologie auf theoretisch-methodischer und kulturwissenschaftlicher Ebene sowie auf traditioneller agyptologischer Basis die vor