A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid (2012) by John Romer5/3/2018
A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid by John Romer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Evidence-Driven, Fascinating, and Witty History of Egypt "And so the shattered relics of old Egypt become shards of the mirror in which we glimpse phantoms of ourselves playing stories from our childhoods." In A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid (2012) John Romer explains the development in Egypt of agriculture, tools, pottery, burial, sacrifice, "Egyptianness," stone work, graphic images, boats, kings, hieroglyphs, gods, ceremonies, tombs, communities, pyramids, and the "state machine." Throughout he also tells the history of Egyptology, focusing on giants of the field like Petrie and Mariette as well as engaging with recent contemporary developments and finds, repeatedly trying to train us to rely on evidence rather than subjective interpretations while reminding us that it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand what people who lived millennia in the past really thought and felt and why they did what they did without imposing our own worldviews and biases on them. Even our understanding of early hieroglyphs is limited by our understanding of later ones. The following passage is typical of his approach: "So Narmer and his successors are enlisted as archaic representatives of the European narrative of history in which nations rise and fall and everything is explained by drum-and-trumpet Darwinism. Pharaonic Egypt, however, was not just another version of those later histories, and had an entirely different tenor." You must be patient if you are eager for pyramids, because Romer does not reach them until part four of his five-part book. But so engaging is his enthusiasm and so bracing his objectivity and so interesting his information and so vivid and clear his writing that he makes his first 100 pages on Egypt from 5000 to 3000 BC (about the making of neolithic culture there and the finding, classifying, and interpreting of its remains) a fascinating read, as in this following passage about ancient knives: "… these elegantly curved broad-bladed knives, with sections as precise and slim as aerofoils, were painstakingly produced by rubbing raw flint with abrasive dust down to the form required. . . . As sharp as cut-throat razors, the fragile blades of these fine knives are best suited to tasks requiring a deal of skill and care. . . like flaying, slitting and disarticulation." And things really pick up speed and interest from Part Two: Making Pharoah, which lasts only 70 pages and from 3000 to 3200 BC, until Romer ends his book with the climax of the stunning scale and perfection of the Great Pyramid in Part Five: Building Ancient Egypt (2650-2550 BC). If I have a criticism about this book, it is that Romer uses sketches for artifacts and sites, and though they are accurate, they don't quite communicate the beauty and fascination of the original works as well as photographs would. Also, maps are rare in Romer's history, and in the Kindle version it's not so easy to go back to them to check again where we are at each given point. But I learned so much from the book and enjoyed it so much that the lack of fancy photographs does not detract much from it. I was mightily impressed by things like the demerits of adopting an agricultural way of life (perhaps "humankind's First Big Mistake"), the way the "Egyptians" from the start imbued their functional pots, knives, arrowheads, etc. with grace and beauty, the introduction into Egyptian culture of cylindrical seals and hybrid human animal figures from Uruk, the development of hieroglyphs from a set of common recurring images, the evolving nature of sacrifice and offering, Romer's analysis of Narmer's palette, the development of pyramids from mastaba tombs and the concomitant development of the organized big nation state and change of craftsmen from individualized stone-vase making to identical stone-block cutting, the competition among 19th-century archeologists for big finds (leading them to do things like purposely smash artifacts they couldn't cart away so that their rivals wouldn't benefit from them!), and so on. Here are some samples of Romer's witty, at times caustic writing: -"The notion, then, that hieroglyphs were created to record human thoughts or speech is absurd." -"No tombs, no history." -"How, then, to proceed, when the very language that we use to describe Metjen's world--words like 'king,' 'courtier', 'Egypt', 'estate' and all the rest--threatens to turn that lost society into a little England?" -"Though we possess her very intestines, we know nothing of the woman or the queen at all." I read this first volume of Romer's history as preparation for my first tour of Egypt and found both book and tour fascinating and enriching. I'm eager now to read the second volume in his history, which is subtitled From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom, and to return to Egypt. I recommend Romer's work to anyone interested in Egypt or well-written history. View all my reviews
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