2021; 385 pages. Full Title: Ancient
Egypt: The Definitive Visual History.
New Author? : Yes. Genres : Ancient
History; Egypt; Non-Fiction; Reference. Overall
Rating : 9*/10.
My seventh-grade “World History” teacher was
Miss Stoudt. Early in the first
semester, she introduced us students to Ancient Egypt in a rather unique way.
“You can remember the Nile River
by looking at your arm,” she said. “Your
shoulder is where the Nile starts, a long way south in central Africa. Your elbow is where the great city of Thebes
is, And down here where your hand is,”
she said spreading her fingers, “is the Nile delta, the most important part of the Egyptian
Empire.”
Her clever demonstration sparked my interest in History then and there, and it remains strong to this day. I owe it all to Miss Stoudt and her “Nile
River arm”. Alas, that’s the only memory
of the history of ancient Egypt that I still remember from her class. So it was high time I read a book on the
subject.
That's where Ancient Egypt: The Definitive Visual History comes
in.
What’s To Like...
Ancient Egypt
is divided into seven historical eras, and covers a total of 5,395 years. Event-wise, it starts with an early
settlement in lower Egypt around 5,000 BCE, and ends when Egypt is reduced to a mere province in the Roman Empire, with most of its inhabitants converted to
Christianity and its gods, such as Horus, depicted in statues as wearing the
armor of Roman soldiers.
Structurally, each entry is a
2-page spread, which contains plenty of pictures of Egyptian archaeological discoveries plus a brief summary of whatever topic is being addressed. Frankly, I was blown away by the number of
relics we have of ancient Egypt, many of which are inscribed with lengthy discourses in hieroglyphics, and whose translations are available
to historians wanting to learn about Egypt’s past, which goes back more than
7,000 years.
I really liked the “flow” to the
book. All of the 30 or so dynasties are
covered to some extent, based on how many relics and ruins remain that commemorate a given ruler. That
means lots of dates and names are given in the book, but it never got tedious because Ancient Egypt also presents lots of aspects of the everyday life for both peasant and pharaoh.
Those "ordinary" topics include:
the layouts of ancient
Egyptian bathrooms,
the partaking of beer and wine
(see below),
board games,
ancient graffiti,
how to make mud bricks,
family life and pets (see below),
the first fiction novels,
including The Tale of Sinuhe (which you can purchase at Amazon) and other
bestsellers which were written more than 3,000 years ago.
Both the quality and quantity of
the hieroglyphics that have survived the ages are staggering. I was fascinated by how many photographs of these symbols were included in the book. One of the final entries covers the Rosetta Stone, an amazing
find which allows us to understand and translate the Egyptian pictographs. It can be argued that it is the greatest archaeological
relic ever unearthed.
Two of the most important words I learned thanks to the Rosetta Stone are:
“ka”: the
spiritual life force in all humans, and the reason all those tombs and pyramids
were built
“maat”: the
cosmic order to the world, or in other word, the will of the gods, and thereby the justification of any actions that a pharaoh might take.
There are zero cusswords in
the book, which is what I’d expect from a scholarly historical treatise. Amazon lists both formats as being 400 pages
long, but the text ends on page 305, with lots of goodies after that, such as: tables (rulers, deities, sites), glossary, and index. The author is listed as “DK
Publishing”, which is the standard practice for the books they put out, but if you check
inside, you’ll find that the text was written by Steven Snape, who, I gather,
is no relation to Severus Snape, a renowned professor at Hogwarts.
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.8/5
based on 311 ratings and 82 reviews.
Goodreads: 4.42/5 based on 53
ratings and 12 reviews
Excerpts...
For every Egyptian, whether rich or poor,
bread was the staple diet and seems to have been eaten at every meal. It was made from Egypt’s abundant supply of
emmer wheat and sometimes barley. State
workers were often paid in bread and sometimes in grain, which suggests that
bread was not just made by official bakers, but also by ordinary people in
their homes.
Beer, which was made from the same basic
ingredients as bread, was also widely available. It was produced by both large-scale
specialists and local brewers. Most
Egyptian beer was probably quite low in alcohol content, and it seems to have
been drunk in large quantities. (pg. 116)
Egypt has often been claimed as the
original home of the household cat. They
were probably domesticated from the Middle Kingdom onward, as images of them do
not appear in Old Kingdom reliefs, but wild species are known from much
earlier. The Egyptian word for cat, miw,
is certainly derived from the sound that they make. During the New Kingdom, cats were shown as
pets in the tombs of the upper classes, especially with women. Unlike dogs, cats were rarely given personal
names, but there were exceptions. One
cat, known as “The Pleasant One,” is depicted in the tomb of Puiemre, at
Thebes. (pg. 274)
Kindle Details…
Ancient
Egypt sells for $19.99 at Amazon at present. DK Publishing offers what seems to be
hundreds of other reference books (I
didn’t even try to count them all), with prices mostly ranging from $1.99
to $19.99.
“If you have eaten
three loaves of bread and drunk two jugs of beer and your belly is still
hungry, restrain it!” (Ancient Egyptian Wisdom Text) (pg. 117)
The only gripes I have about Ancient Egypt involve the
Kindle format.
Be aware that, in order to convert from the hardcover to ebook format, DK Publishing chose to scan each page. That means you can’t highlight any of the
text, the index entries don’t link to anything, and worst of all, the ebook eats up a major chunk of your Kindle storage capacity.
Look it up at Amazon: the size
for this ebook is a whopping 232,625 KB. Now compare it to some text-only ebook on
your Kindle, where the typical file size is 1,000 to 10,000 KB. That means that this book is the equivalent
of 23 to 232 “text-only” ebooks.
To be fair, the text could not
easily be done apart from the scanning due to the clever placement of the many
images. And DK Publishing does helpfully
point out that tapping twice on your Kindle screen automatically expands the page image to a readable
font size. It took a bit of finagling, but eventually I hit upon a method that visually worked for me.
You will too.
Finally, I must note that
whoever at DK Publishing did the Kindle-version blurb, got the subtitle of the
book wrong. The correct subtitle, as shown in the cover mage above, is “The
Definitive Visual History”, the Kindle page erroneously calls it “The
Definitive Illustrated History”.
C’mon, dude, you had one job.
But let’s be clear: Ancient
Egypt is a fantastic effort, with both the text and the pictures being simply
jaw-dropping in content. I highly recommend this book to
all history buffs, but do yourself a favor and shell out the added bucks for the Hardcover version, not the ebook.
9 Stars. Etymology note: In common parlance, the word “graffiti” can be both singular and
plural. The one exception is when it involves archaeology,
when the Italian-based word “graffito”
is then correct. Kudos to the writers and editors of Ancient Egypt for getting this right. English is a goofy language.
