ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reflection about the spatial imagination of the Ancient Egyptians, or to be more precise, as it appears in high culture and literature. It follows a semiotic approach to some landscapes and spatial representations, dating mainly to the New Kingdom. A garden is a landscape at two levels: it is an arrangement of nature and a representation of this arrangement. A society precisely interprets its environment according to its management and manages it according to its interpretation. The garden as a paradigm for perceiving and describing landscapes might explain why in Egyptian art and literature one finds so few real landscapes understood here as the artistic depiction of an actual and identifiable specific place because the artistic forms are actually modeling single places into a universal topos. Landscape and spatial imagination as they can be revealed in literary texts reveal also instances of spatial memory and show how landscapes can be read as a collective cultural representation.
