Ancient Lives by John Romer

[robot_mel]

beluosus bought me this for Christmas as I've asked him to start teaching me Egyptian Hieroglphys and I realised I should know more about Egypt. He knows how much I like Everyday life books and having seen the documentary that accompanied this he thought I'd really enjoy it. This book really brings home the wonder that is Egyptology. It is amazing that to see that such detail can be known about a community that lived over 3000 years ago. The book traces the village, and the villagers, that made the tombs of the pharaohs. It looks at their lives, their labour and their conflicts with each other and the government.

I think this book was written for people who have a greater knowledge of Egypt than I do. References were made to different Pharaohs, without saying what the year in BCE was, or how much time had passed between chapters. The book followed the lives of the important people of the village, their rise to fame, and sometimes their falls from grace.

I could have done with more information about the women in the village. The book focused almost entirely on the men. There was one very touching poem written by a man mourning his lost wife. But on the whole the women were hardly mentioned at all.

I think the last part of the book was the most interesting to me. Egypt had fallen on hard times and could no longer afford to pay its artisans and so the people who were paid to create the tombs ended up robbing them, in quite a clever way so the government took a couple decades to notice. The last chapter looked at the work of 2 centuries of Egyptologists that helped to uncover the story of the village.

This book is definitely a good companion to other histories of Egypt and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the time and their monuments.