Book Review: A History of Ancient Egypt from the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2:From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdomby John RomerSt. Martin's Press, 2017Archaeologist John Romer follows up his 2013 book A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 1: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid with an even bigger second volume: A History of Ancient Egypt: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom, and even so sober a historian must surely admit that this second book is, when it comes to Ancient Egypt, pay dirt. Prehistoric mud-farmers and prototypical mud-ziggurats are all well and good for the professionals, but when it comes to a general reading audience, the real treat is the Egypt of the mighty pharaohs, the Egypt of all the famous old artwork, and especially the Egypt of the monuments that were so staggering in their day that even now, four thousands years later, their time-ravaged remains are still capable of stirring countless tourists to momentary wonder, still capable, indeed, of evoking passionate prose in crusty old professionals:

On a fine day, standing on the breezy ridge of Memphis' desert cemeteries, the better part of Egypt's pyramids are in clear view, from Sneferu's colossal pyramids on the plain of Dahshur in the south to Giza's famous line of three dark triangles. Built for the most part in the twenty-sixth century BC, those mighty pyramids stand as bookends to a line of smaller ones that over the course of the next 300 years were set down between them: eleven royal monuments at least and maybe more to be discovered, along with their attendant temples and an uncounted mass of accompanying tombs.

“Large sand-choked monuments,” Romer writes, “require archaeology on a heroic scale for their excavation, long-term well-funded enterprises that, in the majority of cases, it was these temples' good fortune to host: a succession of French archaeologists and the Egyptian Service des Antiquités working in the Saqqara cemeteries throughout the best part of the last century, a project that continues to this day.” This latest book is both a celebration and a thrilling investigation of the Middle Kingdom, a huge and complicated world that's often been portrayed on page and screen as a cruel place, top-heavy with corrupt priests and oblivious absolute rulers presiding over a sprawling mass of starving, downtrodden slaves. Romer's book, which often reads with the passionate immediacy of a high fantasy epic, patiently paints a very different picture of a much more personal and alluring Egypt, a place with room for the “celebration of the common human need to eat and procreate, the experience of cool rooms on hot days, of a warm dry corner in the winter, of the sensuousness of the human form that the craftsmen rendered so joyfully, of the preciousness of children and the pain suffered at their all too frequent deaths, as the pretty jewellery that [archaeologist William Matthew Flinders] Petrie found upon the babies buried at el-Lahun silently testifies. Babies, so the archaeologist reports, that he in turn had quietly re-interred within the nearby desert.” And there's more:

Had those unfortunate children survived they would have lived in a society where solidarity was stronger than that within the cities of the modern West; where people worked together in extraordinary close community; where for millennia the farmers and miners had provided the materials, tools and rations that enabled great monuments to be constructed. Where the work of dozens of anonymous craftsmen had celebrated that extraordinary harmony in jointly creating a vast series of unique images, sculptural and architectural, such as the world would never make again.

This is evocative stuff, high-flying claims only an expert of Romer's caliber would even try to make – and that would fail in any case if the person making them didn't also have the rhetorical gifts necessary to re-set predispositions. Even more so than its predecessor, this hefty volume rises to the challenge. This is not only the most comprehensive and authoritative history of ancient Egypt to be appearing in English in a century, but it's also the most thought-provoking.