Ancient Egypt As It Was

Charlotte Booth
Quid Publishing
2008
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7058-8

Here we have an imaginative concept as a tourist guide to Thebes in 1200 BC. The guide opens with a historical rundown of Egyptian history leading up to the early descendants of Rameses II and the holy city of Thebes. The author deals briefly with Egypt's unification at the dawn of dynastic history. The reader is introduced to a number of important deities and a quick layout of the cultural development of the Egyptian civilization through time.

The brief sections that the pages are divided into are informative, especially the nomes of Egypt which are rarely represented in publications. The author deals with the nuances of the societal structure of the age, including status and the division of wealth. The ancient Egyptian lady was not subservient to men but could possess assets and estates and could even loan money to her husband, unlike in many other cultures.

In the second chapter, the guide moves to the noisy city of Thebes, which can be as noisy at night as during the day. Several small maps give the landmarks to the Theban zone, including the temple at Karnak and its numerous subsidiary temples dedicated to several other gods besides Amun, the temple of Karnak's central god. Ms. Booth guides the reader around the Luxor temple as well as the temples and shrines at Deir el Bahri, except for Hatshepsut's.

Interesting are the concepts of situations presented to the ancient visitor, which include the 100-year-old ruins of the flooded mortuary temple of Amenhotep III that, in its already abandoned state, can be visited throughout, including the sacred spaces no longer occupied by the king's mortuary priests. Of the Chapel of the White Queen, the author says;

     "The chapel as it stands was built by the heretic king, but was strangely enough not destroyed with the others from his reign, although certain elements can be dated to the earlier reign of Amenhotep Akheppere, and some kitchen buildings still produce food for the festivals on the west bank.

Although abandoned after the reign of the heretic king, it has since been added on by Ramses, and the enclosure wall of his mortuary temple abuts its western wall."

The author makes the statement that most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are in the western valley, when in reality they are in the eastern valley. It is at this point that the book loses some of its effect as the author describes sites, including the royal necropolises and the contents of those tombs that would absolutely not have been on the tourist's path in 1200 BC.

The reader is next guided to the sites around Egypt outside the Theban zone to Mennefer, Pr-Ramese, and the Temple of Ra at Iunu. The vignettes the book is broken into allow for little flow in the text, creating lots of little points of interest but no connective storyline. Having laid out the tourist landscape, Ms. Booth presents native customs of entertainment depending on your budget.

There is a lot to do, including jumping, playing games, hunting hungry hippos, or whacking birds on the head with a stick, or better yet, just go back to bed. Thankfully, the Egyptian calendar was full of festivals for the public to participate in. Ms. Booth lays down how to, and what to buy, while at Thebes, but recommends that blank rolls of papyrus make for an excellent light currency to pay for goods.

The reader is informed of various words and phrases to help communicate with the locals, including dealing with health issues should the visitor experience illness while traveling. The guide ends with a section on references and resources for the reader to follow up on the subject.

I found the book's concept interesting from the start and was filled with many tidbits that one would not normally find. It must be noted that the choppy nature of the book's various elements removed all flow, resulting in the book being slightly tedious and boring.

The lack of colored photos might also make this book less appealing to many readers, including younger readers. "Ancient Egypt As It Was" is not a book to rush out to get, and certainly nothing I will revisit in the future.

Mountains of the Pharaohs

Zahi Hawass
Random House
United States of America
2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-50305-1
First Edition

This nicely sized book by Zahi Hawass begins with an introduction to the history of the Giza plateau, with King Khufu and his architect Hemiunu choosing the place for the king's pyramid. A couple of generations later, the plateau was essentially finished as the royal burial ground of the Fourth Dynasty. The incredible monuments had begun their fame that would draw visitors throughout the rest of history, including a group of imaginative types who believed they were created so that the English race could read the mystery in the measurements of their construction.



This amazing dynasty began with Khufu's father, King Sneferu, and the building of his pyramid at Meidum, which today looks more like a giant pillar than a pyramid. Sneferu gained the reputation of having been a wise king who went on to build more pyramids, including the first true pyramid, later on at Dashur and the Bent Pyramid at that same site.



     'A very strange discovery was made by English archaeologist John Perring and Richard Howard Vyse as they explored this pyramid in the late 1830s. Their workmen were clearing the interior passages and suffering greatly because of the intense heat. On October 15, 1839, they opened a tunnel that led to one of the interior chambers. Suddenly, they were greeted by a refreshing draft of cool air, so strong that it blew out their torches. The wind continued for two days, and then stopped as suddenly as it had started, leaving the archaeologists completely mystified as to its source.'



The chapters are short and almost completely void of pictures except for a small group of colored photographs near the middle of the book. With the death of Snefuru, his son Khufu mounts the throne and moves his court to Giza, where his pyramid was to be built, but first his palace and administration buildings had to be built, including a canal dug to receive ships that will bring supply's needed in the building and the leveling off of the site to begin the foundation of the pyramid.



The pyramid rose quickly as Khufu's court settled down to the king's business from Aswan to Giza to Heliopolis. In reality, the king's court was as much a bureaucracy as the king's extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren to the king's crown prince. Not helpful to archaeologists today is the number of these royals who bore the same name or names similar. So far, I am enjoying this read and find it suitable for a teen, though the lack of pictures might be a turn off; even so, the book is likely to be enjoyed by readers far above those young Egyptian enthusiasts.



After a successful reign of Khufu, he dies, leaving his heir, Djedefre, to make the final arrangements for his father's mortuary needs, including the sealing of boats in the boat pits dug for that purpose. With Khufu's passing, Djedefre chose a high plateau at Abu Rawash overlooking his father's pyramid to build his own pyramid and mortuary complex. The site at Abu Rawash has been particularly badly damaged, with the king's statues being smashed with what may have been vengeance, and the site quarried away for stones to build other projects up to modern times.



The intrigues of this dynasty follow the death of Khufu and have created imaginative scenarios in the minds of past explorers. In Khafre's mortuary complex, we find one of the few well-preserved Old Kingdom funerary temples decorated with many statues of the king, of which one is likely the great masterpiece in royal statuary of the Old Kingdom. Arriving at the photographs, the reader finds a bonnie lot of sixteen images, mostly of the pyramids mentioned.



      'The relationships between Khafre's pyramid temples and the Sphinx temple also link the Sphinx to Khafre: Khafre's valley temple sits on the same rock-cut terrace as the Sphinx temple. The fronts and backs of the temples are nearly aligned, and the walls of both are built in the same style of large limestone blocks with harder red granite added as a finish. And there is evidence that these limestone blocks were quarried from the Sphinx ditch itself.



The author goes on to explain the personalities of Khafre's court and their respective burial houses at Giza. A fascinating read if I can keep straight the queens all bearing identical names and who is next in line of an uncertain succession. The death of Khafre (perhaps before any of his queens) may have left a void in this succession, with the king's heir Menkaure too young to rule, so that Khafre's brothers may in turn have held the post briefly before Menkaure was able to rule.



In this king's pyramid, we find the smallest of the three king's pyramids at Giza, but built with costlier materials, including a granite casing for at least some of the pyramid and many of the Old Kingdom's finest statues of the ruler with the goddess Hathor and nome gods of Upper Egypt. When the king flew to heaven, his successor, Shepseskaf, completed Menkaure's mortuary complex in cheaper materials like mud brick.



In the next section, the author deals with the modern discoveries of the city of the pyramid builders and their mostly mud brick tombs to the south of the pyramids. These discoveries, while slightly mundane, introduce the reader to the sympathetic standard of living endured by the builders as not slaves being brutally beaten but to fellow men and women in joint causes to the betterment of the king and well-being of his people.



In the end, the house of the Fourth Dynasty passes to the kings of the Fifth Dynasty, who move their palaces and burial structures to Abusir, leaving Giza to be abandoned, vandalized, and quarried. The statues of the kings in the mortuary temples were smashed to create funerary offerings for lesser burials at the end of the Old Kingdom.



Zahi Hawass has created in this document a specific and understandable format of the family of King Snefuru and his descendants. Particularly those members of his family who created the monuments on the Giza plateau, including the Great Pyramid. I have really only one complaint, in that the book could have used a map to demonstrate the sites at Giza being put forward. Mountains of Pharaohs would make an excellent and uniquely informative gift to anyone interested in ancient Egypt or Pyramids.

The Illustrated Guide To The Egyptian Museum In Cairo

The American University in Cairo Press
Cairo, Egypt
2001
Dar El Katube No. 9227 / 00
ISBN 978 977 424 608 1

This guide to the Egyptian museum in Cairo is a nice size to carry around the museum, and a jewel box of colorful pictures which include some of the finest works of Egyptian art. The introduction is by Dr. Zahi Hawass, complete with very nice images of Egypt's first national museum, founded in the Boulaq neighborhood of nineteenth-century Cairo. The Boulaq Museum was prone to flooding added to the fast-growing size of the collection, necessitating its move to a new home in Tahrir Square in 1902.


The guide contains lots of useful information for visitors to the museum, including maps and other practical notes, advice, and chronology. As the visitor enters the museum, they will come upon room 43, where the guide gives the reader a description of Egypt's Predynastic period, including the unifying of Upper and Lower Egypt and into its Archaic period of Dynasties I and II, leading to the Old Kingdom beginning with the famous palette of Narmer of Dynasty 0.

The first unusual things that caught my eye are four necklaces from the Thinite period of Dynasties I and II. Three of the necklaces were found by Z. Saad at Helluan in 1942, and the last in 1945. One of the necklaces, a faience choker with a pendant of a falcon on a boat, was found on the neck of a First Dynasty mummy. The guide is, of course, packed with many of the collection's most famous pieces, but with a considerable many more like the previously mentioned necklaces, being unknown to me.


A parade of minimally dressed officials of the Old Kingdom, their servants, and their rulers, often in excellent states of preservation. The men wear a short skirt or loincloth and perhaps some jewelry, while the women wear tight sheer sheer-fitting dresses with or without the breasts covered, completed with accessories.


In room 41 can be found some fragments from the Fourth Dynasty Mastaba tomb of Prince Nofermaat at Maydum. Unique in its technique of inlaying colored paste into its limestone-carved scenes, it produced immensely beautiful works of art that, unfortunately, had the fault that after the paste elements dried out, they proceeded to fall out of the limestone intaglio.


The reader is next on to the Middle Kingdom, dominated by the Theban rulers of Dynasty XII who moved their capital to the Fayum. This is ancient Egypt's 'Classical  Period' in which the arts excelled and in some cases were never to be improved upon, with particular importance in the thoughtful and reflective literature of the age. My favorite sculpture of the age is likely a black granite bust of Amenemhet III wearing the wig of a priest. One of a number of unique and stunning depictions of this late Middle Kingdom ruler that are to be found in room 16.

The guide is fast-moving with lots of provenances given to the objects on its pages. Unfortunately for me, I am a lover of mummies, and so far, there are no mummies. The authors present a short rundown of the New Kingdom, representing several attractive and colorful stela of minor officials, followed by statuary of high officials and royalty located in room 12. The 1906 accidental discovery at Deir el Bahri of a shrine and statue dedicated to the cow goddess Hathor brought to light a monument in an outstanding state of preservation can also be found in the same room.


 As I get deeper into the guide, the words and pictures vanish into the crevice of the book, requiring the spine to be broken apart to catch those details. The famous Amarna period material kept in room 3 contains an image of a young girl eating a duck. This is such a rare depiction in thousands of years of ancient Egyptian art executed by a talented hand. So many masterpieces, it is hard to choose, but a less well-known relief in the museum of a block representing prisoners being grabbed by the hair in a classic smiting scene is among the finest of such cheery scenes and a great work of art that can be found in room 14.

As I continue reading on into the Late period, I am impressed by the huge number of sculptures and stelas in the guide from the court of the cachette deposit of statuary found by George Legrain at Karnak at the beginning of the last century. With the Ptolemaic rulers, Egyptian art became Hellenized, containing both the traditional Egyptian formulas but modified to please Ptolemaic sensibilities.


The guide is next on to the boy King Tutankhamun and his treasures with a brief rundown of his life and the discovery of his tomb. The objects presented are completely standard choices used time and time again, but that is to be expected for this museum's guide. In room 4 on the first floor, we have the jewelry vault, including lots of magical gems, though light on Old Kingdom material, the guide is deservedly and thankfully heavy on the Middle Kingdom royal jewelry. The Old Kingdom gold belt of Prince Ptahshepses is a favorite of mine. The jewels of the Middle Kingdom queens and princesses make up a magnificent treasure within the jewelry collection without equal in quality and delicacy.


From room 4, the visitor will head next to room 2, containing the treasures of the pharaohs found by Pierre Montet at Tanis in the years surrounding the Second World War. The tomb Montet found was that of the Pharaoh Pseusunnes I of Dynasty XXI. As luck would have it, the tomb also contained the funerary remains and mummies of a number of other kings of the period.

Unlike the childish paraphernalia created to amuse the boy Tutankhamun here at Tanis, Mr. Montet found equally stunning material, but in this case, created for a mature ruler and his class. Found on the mummy of King Pseusennes I was a double string of large lapis lazuli and gold balls. One of the lapis balls has an antique inscription dedicating it to the gods of Assur hundreds of years before the life of King Pseusennes I.


Walking down the long corridor of the first floor, a visitor to the museum might be getting a little run down by now, but will here find a series of rooms devoted to grave articles and containing some very important finds. In room 12, the viewer will be met with objects from the Valley of Kings tomb of Amenhotep II, and the royal cachette tomb DB 320. Next door, room 17 contains the grave hardware from the intact tomb of Sennedjem, which contained the funerary remains of twenty members of his family.


Several rooms are occupied with the Middle Kingdom funerary material, including the famous high-quality models of Meketre found undisturbed in a secret chamber of his tomb. The guide moves on to sarcophaguses, opening with a brief on the importance the sarcophagus took on in later periods when tombs decorated with magic spells were too expensive for most people to afford. This led to the coffin texts covering the exterior and interior of coffins.

In room 43 on the first floor, opposite the lunette, can be found the grave goods of Queen Tiye's parents, Yuya and Tuya. When found in 1905 in the Valley of Kings, their tomb was in good condition, containing most of its furnishings and mummies in an excellent state of preservation. Visitors will find ostraca and papyrus documents in room 24, with an ostraca of a woman playing a lute. The artist who drew the woman has viewed her unconventionally from above, creating an amazing sketch.

The viewer moves on now to room 19, which is filled with statuettes of various gods. At 88cm tall, the gold and silver sarcophagus for a falcon is an eye catcher found among other gorgeous objects in the Dendera treasure. About a thousand Fayum Roman period portraits have come to light over the years from a number of cemeteries around Egypt. The portraits were found on mummies or, in some cases, next to the mummy,  including some being found by Sir Flinders Petrie in his excavations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book ends with a five-page look at mummies, in this case, the most famous kings, for a total of six mummies for the entire 632-page guide. The almost total exclusion, definitely for me, represents a low point for this publication. The back of the book contains a helpful list of images of objects and where they can be quickly located both in the guide and the museum.

Overall, the guide is a very fine and useful thing to have while touring this vast museum and its treasures. There were minor printing mistakes, but nothing of any consequence. Depending on the visitor or reader, this guide may be helpful to those studying the Karnak cachette statue deposit, as a large amount of that material is represented here, but if mummies are your thing, then this read is a total loss.
Notes:

Many thanks to Derek Wilson, who picked this guide up for me on his latest journey to Cairo.

Also sold as;
The Treasures of Ancient Egypt
2003
ISBN 13: 978-88 540-0834-2

1. Statue of Thutmosis III as Sphinx: Tour Egypt
2. Coffin of Psusennes I: Jerzy Strzelecki
3. Yuya's Mask with thanks to Jon Bodsworth

Egypt Revealed

T. G. H. James
The Folio Society LTD.
London
1997
ASIN B000UJSD12

This attractive book opens with the usual rundown on ancient Egyptian history, accompanied by a fairly standard set of images and drawings. The author takes the reader to the age of modern Egyptology through the many explorers, but particularly English explorers of the last couple of centuries, in the volume.


In the days before the second decade of the nineteenth century, Egypt was a dangerous territory to explore, resulting in only a few European men who dared the journey, not always with success, some of whom came back home and paid heavily for failure. An early traveler was John Greaves, who visited Egypt in the 1630s and wrote of the Giza pyramids in his 1646 publication,


    ' Aristotle judged them to be the Works of Tyranny; and Pliny conjectures that they built them, partly out of ostentation, and partly out of State policy, by keeping the people in employment, to divert them from Mutinies and Rebellions. But the true reason depends on higher and more weighty considerations. And this sprang from the Theology of the Egyptians, who believe that so long as the Body endured, so long the Soul continued with it.'


The value of the materials, particularly in the drawings left by these early explorers capture frequently captures details that no longer exist in our time, including the temple of Armant, dismantled for a sugar factory. These adventurers were followed in suit with a continuation of the ancient Roman policy of removing obelisks and everything of perceived value to Europe.


The reader is introduced to William John Bankes, and British consul in Egypt, Henry Salt, of whom's combined efforts contributed to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs, though not much to their credit. Both men would add to the science of Egyptology for their day, but ultimately it would be their status as Englishmen with deep pockets that made the material accessible to scholars in Europe, and also for their drawings, which may be their greatest personal additions still relevant today in the science of Egyptology.


The list follows from one well-healed English scholar to another, with names of the who's of the educated elites of the day led by letters of the English empire. Fine schooling produced high-quality results from surveys of epigraphy, which foresaw their own importance and recorded with amazing fineness and acute observations, knowledge of temples, hieroglyphs, and nuances of things that no longer exist on the ground today. A romantic watercolor by Henry Salt of "Grand Cairo," which he painted in 1809, is an example of great beauty, as is the small image by John Gardiner Wilkinson of an Egyptian chariot.


  "The Ptolemaic temple at Antaeopolis had been swept into the Nile in 1821; the small temple of Amenophis III on the island of Elephantine had been dismantled in 1822 to provide building material for a palace of Mohammed Ali Pasha at Aswan; the great site in Middle Egypt of Hermopolis Magna, a center of the great god Toth who was, among other things, the scribe of the gods, was a continuing source of material for building, and other purposes."


Passing through the halfway point, the book is a bit of a retelling of the lords of the empire, and not the Egyptian empire. It is here that the reader is presented with a lovely two-page color image of the banquet scene held for Nebamun. The famous piece of art from that man's funerary chapel at Luxor, among others now in the British Museum.


Not too little could be said for the illustrations adorning the book, of which many are rarely seen and a definite interesting strong point for readers. The purpose and expenses of epigraphy laid bare produced monuments, where damage or no monument exists today.


In Miss Emelia Edwards, we find a champion of the Egyptian landscape and its monuments. At Abu Simbel, many years earlier, the taking of plaster casts of the northernmost colossus of Rameses II had been completed with not much care for cleaning up the mess properly at that time, and as a result, the head was disfigured by chunks of bright plaster that had adhered to the face. This situation was corrected by Miss Edwards and her fellow party members in 1874.


     "A scaffolding of spars and oars was at once improvised, and the men, delighted as children at play, were soon swarming over the large head, just as the carvers may have swarmed over it in the days when Rameses was king. All they had to do was remove any small lumps [of plaster] that might yet adhere to the surface, and then tint the white patches with coffee."It took them three afternoons to complete the job, and we were all sorry when it came to an end."


Miss Edwards went on to found the Egypt Exploration Society and, with her energies, has left a legacy of Egyptian history recovered from its oblivion. Mr. James moves through the early excavators working on behalf of the society, including Percy Newberry and Flinders Petrie. From these early days, we see the great skills of artists copying the paintings on the tomb walls, like Howard Carter, in particular, a fresh face with great talent, and still in his teens.


Arriving in Egypt and but 17 years of age, Howard Carter's artistic ability was confident and of tremendous value to the archaeologists whose guidance he worked under, though Petrie felt it of little use to train him as an excavator. Carter, being trained as an artist, realized early on that the mechanical devices used for epigraphy were no substitute for a competent hand. In the end, most will remember him as the man who discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb and not for his amazing works in epigraphical recording at sites like Beni Hassan and Deir El Bahri, to name a couple.


I was very much taken by the point of the importance of the epigraphical volumes produced, leaving a record of not only fading inscriptions but of ancient Egyptians living, working, playing, and at rest. The late Mr. James has brought a history not of excavation but of the memory of those ghosts who linger in their houses of eternity, as well as the great rulers and men whose deeds they wanted to be remembered.


"Egypt Revealed" is a fine telling suitable for most, but perhaps intended for readers of more mature age, though, whatever the age, Mr. T. G. H. James' book is a must-have for any Egyptian collection.