The Egyptologist


Book Description

BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, The Song Is You, Prague, and Angelica. From the bestselling author of Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king. This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court in turmoil. Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find in the history of archaeology, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble, having staked his professional reputation and his fiancée’s fortune on a scrap of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile, a relentless Australian detective sets off on the case of his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer. And another murderer. And possibly another murderer. The confluence of these seemingly separate stories results in an explosive ending, at once inevitable and utterly unpredictable. Arthur Phillips leads this expedition to its unforgettable climax with all the wit and narrative bravado that made Prague one of the most critically acclaimed novels of 2002. Exploring issues of class, greed, ambition, and the very human hunger for eternal life, this staggering second novel gives us a glimpse of Phillips’s range and maturity–and is sure to earn him further acclaim as one of the most exciting authors of his generation.




American Egyptologist


Book Description

James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) had a career that epitomizes our popular image of the archaeologist. Daring, handsome, and charismatic, he traveled on expeditions to remote and politically unstable corners of the Middle East, helped identify the tomb of King Tut, and was on the cover of Time magazine. But Breasted was more than an Indiana Jones—he was an accomplished scholar, academic entrepreneur, and talented author who brought ancient history to life not just for students but for such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Sigmund Freud. In American Egyptologist, Jeffrey Abt weaves together the disparate strands of Breasted’s life, from his small-town origins following the Civil War to his evolution into the father of American Egyptology and the founder of the Oriental Institute in the early years of the University of Chicago. Abt explores the scholarly, philanthropic, diplomatic, and religious contexts of his ideas and projects, providing insight into the origins of America’s most prominent center for Near Eastern archaeology. An illuminating portrait of the nearly forgotten man who demystified ancient Egypt for the general public, American Egyptologist restores James Henry Breasted to the world and puts forward a brilliant case for his place as one of the most important scholars of modern times.




The Wonders of Egypt


Book Description




A History of World Egyptology


Book Description

A History of World Egyptology is a ground-breaking reference work that traces the study of ancient Egypt over the past 150 years. Global in purview, it enlarges our understanding of how and why people have looked, and continue to look, into humankind's distant past through the lens of the enduring allure of ancient Egypt. Written by an international team of scholars, the volume investigates how territories around the world have engaged with, and have been inspired by, ancient Egypt and its study, and how that engagement has evolved over time. Chapters present a specific territory from different perspectives, including institutional and national, while examining a range of transnational links as well. The volume thus touches on multiple strands of scholarship, embracing not only Egyptology, but also social history, the history of science and reception studies. It will appeal to amateurs and professionals with an interest in the histories of Egypt, archaeology and science.




Wonderful Things


Book Description

The discovery of ancient Egypt and the development of Egyptology are momentous events in intellectual and cultural history. The history of Egyptology is the story of the people, famous and obscure, who constructed the picture of ancient Egypt that we have today, recovered the Egyptian past while inventing it anew, and made a lost civilization comprehensible to generations of enchanted readers and viewers thousands of years later.




A World Beneath the Sands


Book Description

'It is a story full of drama, with the Nile, the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings as backdrop. That A World Beneath the Sands is also a subtle and stimulating study of the paradoxes of 19th-century colonialism is a bonus indeed.' - Tom Holland, GuardianWhat could be more exciting, more exotic or more intrepid than digging in the sands of Egypt in the hope of discovering golden treasures from the age of the pharaohs? Our fascination with ancient Egypt goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the heyday of Egyptology was undoubtedly the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This golden age of scholarship and adventure is neatly book-ended by two epoch-making events: Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later.In A World Beneath the Sands, the acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson tells the riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt's ancient civilisation drove them to uncover its secrets. Champollion, Carter and Carnarvon are here, but so too are their lesser-known contemporaries, such as the Prussian scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, the Frenchman Auguste Mariette and the British aristocrat Lucie Duff-Gordon. Their work - and those of others like them - helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too. Travellers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and epigraphers, antiquarians and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever their methods, all understood that in pursuing Egyptology they were part of a greater endeavour - to reveal a lost world, buried for centuries beneath the sands.




Egyptologists' Notebooks


Book Description

A gorgeous presentation of intimate diaries and journals that captures the excitement of the golden age of Egyptology. For centuries, the ancient ruins of Egypt have provided an endless source of fascination for explorers, antiquarians, archaeologists, and the public. All, from the very earliest travelers, were entranced by the beauty of the landscape and the remains of tombs, temples, and cities consumed by drift sand. Early adventurers were gripped by the urge to capture what they saw in writings, sketches, paintings, and photographs. While it was always the Egyptologists who were in charge, they depended on the assistance of architects, artists, engineers, and photographers. Yet when we read about Flinders Petrie and Norman de Garis Davies, we rarely hear about their wives, Hilda and Nina, or how the work of Amelia Edwards helped to fund their explorations. Only through diaries, letters, and other archival discoveries have we come to realize how important these other partners were. Similarly, the contributions of Egyptians, such as Hassan Effendi Hosni, are only now coming to light. Egyptologists' Notebooks is a visual celebration of Egypt's ancient past, featuring evocative sketches, paintings, and photographs from pioneering explorers' and archaeologists' journals. Reproduced in their original form, they provide intimate, behind-the-scenes access to the archaeological discovery of Egypt.




Amelia Edwards


Book Description

This, the first biography of Amelia Edwards, sets out her work as the founder of the Egypt Exploration Society and writer of A Thousand Miles up the Nile in the context of her previous career as novelist and journalist. It traces her development from a multi-gifted child to an adventurous and unconventional woman and finally to her life as a dedicated and reclusive worker in the cause of exploring and safeguarding the antiquities of Egypt.




Omm Sety's Living Egypt


Book Description

A special connection with ancient Egypt drew Omm Sety to Egypt, where she studied with the great Egyptologists Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry. For more than four decades she made her home in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and in the mudbrick village surrounding the Temple of Sety I at Abydos. For her, there was no separation between ancient and modern Egypt. Pictures on tomb walls illustrated the games children played in the streets in front of her house. The texts she translated from the temple walls shed light on the origins of the social customs of her Egyptian neighbors. For another four decades this book, which deserves to be called Omm Sety's life work, remained hidden away. Now Nicole B. Hansen, an Egyptologist who specializes in connections between ancient and modern Egypt, brings this work to light in an annotated edition with extensive notes and bibliography, illustrated with Omm Sety's own drawings. It features a foreword by Kent R. Weeks, who rediscovered KV5 in the Valley of the Kings, and an introduction by Walter A. Fairservis, the late director of the Hierakonpolis Project. For Egyptologists, this book includes explanations of texts from the Pyramid Texts to Herodotus as well as ancient Egyptian art. For anthropologists, it represents the results of a lifetime of unbridled participant-observation, during which Omm Sety used folk treatments to cure her ills and agreed to serve as a medium for a spirit during a magic ritual. For those interested in Omm Sety herself, this book provides new insights into her life, the people she knew and the places she lived.




The Good Kings


Book Description

Written in the tradition of historians like Mary Beard and Stacy Schiff who find modern lessons in ancient history, this provocative narrative explores the lives of five remarkable pharaohs who ruled Egypt with absolute power, shining a new light on the country's 3,000-year empire and its meaning today. In a new era when democracies around the world are threatened or crumbling, best-selling author Kara Cooney turns to five ancient Egyptian pharaohs--Khufu, Senwosret III, Akenhaten, Ramses II, and Taharqa--to understand why many so often give up power to the few, and what it can mean for our future. As the first centralized political power on earth, the pharaohs and their process of divine kingship can tell us a lot about the world's politics, past and present. Every animal-headed god, every monumental temple, every pyramid, every tomb, offers extraordinary insight into a culture that combined deeply held religious beliefs with uniquely human schemes to justify a system in which one ruled over many. From Khufu, the man who built the Great Pyramid at Giza as testament to his authoritarian reign, and Taharqa, the last true pharaoh who worked to make Egypt great again, we discover a clear lens into understanding how power was earned, controlled, and manipulated in ancient times. And in mining the past, Cooney uncovers the reason why societies have so willingly chosen a dictator over democracy, time and time again.




Recent Books