Ancient Egypt

For someone with an interest in Egypt, especially if that someone has visited some of the country's staggering ancient monuments, this is a priceless and I believe unique explanation of how such things came to be. We are used, far too used, to histories that view Egypt only in terms of pharaonic successions, a string of wars and conquests, victories and defeats. Those writers have seen only the gaudiest splashes of colour on the canvas, and completely neglected the intricately detailed background.

John Romer begins the story around 4000BC, at Lake Faiyum west of modern-day Cairo. From archaeological evidence such as fish and animal bones in the remains of cooking sites, he reconstructs how the lives of those early semi-nomadic people must have been lived, and does so without being dryly academic. Storing grain in woven baskets was a huge step forward that enabled settlement leading to the construction of permanent dwellings, but here I must stop attempting to summarise the... Read more

I always make a point of watching John Romer's all too infrequent documentaries on television. His erudition is matched only by his lucidity. It is impossible to listen to him without learning something.

Such is the case with his latest book, "A History of Ancient Egypt". In the preface he points out that it is over fifty years since the last comprehensive history of ancient Egypt was published. As was the case with all previous histories, it reiterated largely accepted but too cursorily criticised conventional wisdom and was centred largely on the pharaohs and the priesthood. Moreover, such narratives as were constructed to descry ancient Egypt were filtered by the preconceptions of those writing them. Value-free history was a largely alien concept. History, as we know, is written by the winners. As Romer points out, it is also written by the literate. There were many centuries of Egyptian civilisation before hieroglyphs were invented yet those centuries were, by... Read more

AMAZON REVIEW 1

I liked this book, as the five stars indicate. John Romer is what I would describe as a writer of the old school - beautifully constructed prose, with no needless embellishments, eschewing the habits, so frequent amongst modern writers of popular history and science, of references to contemporary "celebrities" (to show how "cool" they are), patches of purple prose, dramatisation of facts and events, with sometimes not a little added fantasy (in the hope of a TV series). He presents the facts punchily, unembroidered, and without needless distractions, but still in an easily readable style. If I said his writing was "scholarly" that would be true, too, but might convey a wrong impression to those who, like me, are not so scholarly...

It's perhaps just as well there's no superfluous prose here; the book already runs to around 500 pages and deals with 2500 years of REALLY ancient history, starting in 5000 BC, and ending with the pyramids; a second... Read more