Book Review

Good things can come in small packages. Lush photographs and full color make this short book worth the money. While Hayes suggests this introduction to ancient Egypt is also for adults, its simplistic tone is better suited to children -- as a first introduction, especially for an intermediate young reader, The Egyptians is a wonderful place to start.

One of my biggest disappointments getting into the Egyptological community (though, it can be safely said, there really may not be such a thing) was that a number of otherwise very good books went quickly out of date because of the pace at which we learn new things about Egypt; the second was the seeming lack of any females in the field.

"Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids," begins a modern Egyptian proverb. Even to the last millennia of the Kemetic culture, the stone "houses of eternity" left as legacies by ephemeral god-kings were a puzzlement, an exhibition of unexplained majesty. In all periods of later Kemetic history, it was high compliment and the ultimate reverence to be able to compare oneself to "the first time" when Kemet's splendor had yet been untouched by outside forces such as invasion and international diplomacy.

A Dictionary of Ancient Egypt was written by a woman named Margaret Bunson. Maragaret Bunson is an art history professor with a "lifelong interest in Egypt," and she did all her own illustration work instead of using copies of extant art like most Egyptological resources do, so I didn't hold this book up to the standards that I would, say, something from Yale University Press; though it was published by Oxford University Press...

This wonderfully illustrated little book brought tears to my eyes the first time I saw it. Carol Greger's done a marvelous job weaving together the separate strands of the Iunu (Heliopolis) Creation Myths, from the rising of Tem (called "Atum" here) from the Nun, to the creation of living beings, Netjer and earth.

It has been said that little is known about the daily life of people in ancient Egypt (Kemet). In fact, this primary misconception has been the basis of a number of other biases and misconceptions about Kemet, including many regarding the ancient people's religion (such as the commonly-held belief that the religion of Kemet must have died out because it was inferior to later faiths, or that since nobody knows how they practiced it anyway, why bother).