Bridget, Lisa, Weavers, Gaedtkes, and I are getting ready for our trip to 
Egypt in the next few weeks. I can’t wait, but I also wanted to get a better sense of Egyptian history. When we went to Peru earlier in the year, I read a great book about the Incas, and I was looking for something similar.
This was not the book.
I am in the minority when I say this book was not very good. (Amazon readers love this book.) The author seemed to be a name dropper rather than a story teller. And it wasn’t a very good intro book.
When I think of Egypt, I think of Cleopatra (not mentioned at all), King Tut (about a page or two), and the great monuments (she did well with these).
So my overall sense of Egypt right now that I’m able to take away:
- – The Egyptian culture is centered around death with tombs, mummies, and pyramids
- – Lower Egypt is in the north; Upper Egypt is in the south
- – Hatshepsut – A very strong and powerful female pharoah
- – Thutmose III – a great leader and extended Egypt’s empire to the largest it would ever be
- – Akenaten – He introduced monotheism and was very motivated by the arts
- – Ramses II – He really liked himself and wrote his name everywhere… on everything. But didn’t do as much as the above rulers.
The author got a little lost in the details of covering the thousands of years of history. And she’s definitely not afraid to share her opinion, which at times, was nice to have. But then at the end of the book, she completely loses it, as you can see with the last paragraph.
“The lament for a dead child, the demand for justice, the lover’s yearning for this beloved-before our recognition of the universality of human emotion, time and distance shrink, the barriers of language, color, and nationality go down; we look into the mid of a man three millennia dead and call him ‘brother.'”
I’m not smart enough in how that last sentence, perhaps one of the most important in a book, relates to the subject of Egypt.
So, all in all, I am a little more informed on Egypt, but this book for the most part went over my head, and I absolutely don’t recommend as the introduction book to Egypt.