Just Finished Reading: Ancient Egypt – A Very Short Introduction by Ian Shaw


Yes, I know; another VSI book and another book on Ancient Egypt. But I can’t help the fact that I find the subject fascinating. Anyway, this excellent little study based itself around the examination of an object called the Narmer Palette uncovered in 1898 in Upper Egypt. Through examination of various aspects of it the author teases out the history of Egyptology, the changing ideas surrounding the idea of Egypt, the attempts to understand the history of the region and how difficult it is to construct such a thing from available evidence, the origin and understand of Egyptian writing including the deciphering of hieroglyphs, our ideas of Egyptian kingship, issues of ethnicity, race and gender, mummification and Egyptian religious practices, how our ideas of the Ancient Egyptians are recycled and reinvented by each successive generation and finishes off with a light hearted look at some of the more crazy theories surrounding the pyramids – he even mentions the movie Stargate (but not the spin-off series).

As you can imagine this is quite a lot to cover in 159 pages (this is actually the longest VSI book I’ve read to date). But at no time does the author overwhelm the reader with an avalanche of facts or theories. Quite steadily the reader is presented with layer upon layer of information, theory and a sprinkle of speculation (not everything being known for certain regarding much of that by-gone age) that builds into a fascinating picture of life during the millennia long Egyptian period. Obviously such a huge subject can only be touched upon in such a short volume – which is exactly what was delivered – but it was done in such a style that my interest was hooked and I was left wanting much more. In other words this book did exactly what it set out to do – fascinate its readership on the subject at hand. There will, inevitably, be follow ups to this book. Ancient Egypt is a very interesting subject that deserves more of my time (along with many other periods of history unfortunately). This was a good start and has given me a useful foundation on which to build. If you are new to the subject this is definitely a book for you. You’ll finish reading it to discover sand between your toes.