The Story of Egypt
The Epic History of the World's Greatest Civilisation
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
The epic 4000-year story of the world's greatest civilisation from a world-leading Egyptologist
The history of Egypt is full of spectacular sites and epic stories, an evolving society rich in heroes and villains, inventors and intellectuals, artisans and pioneers. Now Professor Joann Fletcher pulls together the complete Story of Egypt - charting the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptians while putting their whole world into a context that we can all relate to.
Joann Fletcher uncovers some fascinating revelations, from Egypt's oldest art to the beginnings of mummification almost two thousand years earlier than previously believed. She also looks at the women who became pharaohs on at least 10 occasions, and the evidence that the Egyptians built the first Suez Canal, circumnavigated Africa and won victories at the original Olympic games. From Ramses II's penchant for dying his greying hair to how we know Montuhotep's wife bit her nails and the farmer Baki liked eating in bed, Joann Fletcher brings the history and people of ancient Egypt alive, as nobody else can.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this broad survey targeted to casual readers, British Egyptologist Fletcher (Cleopatra the Great) explains how the ancient Egyptian civilization laid the foundations for the modern world. To contemporary sensibilities, the Egyptians can seem inordinately obsessed with the afterlife, and one could be forgiven for believing that their most impressive achievements are their own bodies' repositories, often protected by ingenious and elaborate security measures regularly replicated in what Fletcher dismisses as "bad Hollywood films." Tombs do feature prominently throughout, but Fletcher takes pains to illuminate the more quotidian concerns of her subjects, such as the proliferation of graffiti polluting said funerary monuments, about which ancient public servants groused. Though often pictured as existing in splendid isolation, the Egyptians literate, numerate, spiritual, and philosophical carried on rich intellectual and commercial relations, as well as military campaigns, with such contemporaries as Greece, Nubia, and Persia. Ptolemy IV, who styled himself a "New Dionysos," traded extensively with Rome, a connection that would end in disaster. Fletcher's telling encompasses pharaohs and their royal retinue as well as "weavers, artists, butchers and bakers, brewers, florists and perfume-makers." Readers already interested in mummies, pyramids, and hieroglyphics will appreciate Fletcher's depth and breadth of knowledge about the civilization that created them.
