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Aufstieg Und Fall Des Alten Ägypten (2012)

by Toby A.H. Wilkinson(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

DVA

review 1: Ancient Egypt is one of those ubiquitous and ill-known things with veneer of false familiarity. I read a bit of history, and for me, Egypt was King Tut, The old, Middle and New Kingdoms, and Cleopatra and the Egypt that comes down through the Greek and Roman Classics--Egypt the decadent; Egypt as Caesar's granary.I had no idea.When Cleopatra took her own life in 30-something BC, she stood at the end of a 3100 year tradition. So as much time and cultural distance separated Cleopatra from the first Pharaoh...as the time and distance between us and the end of the Minoan culture. Egypt is old; unnervingly so.This book begins to flesh out those fathomless abysms of time. SO MUCH HAPPENED. Three times the Egyptians rose into a flowering of Civilization; its hard to imagine ... morethat there where whole dark ages, akin to the 6-8th centuries in Europe, after the fall of Rome. Catastrophic, grievous break-downs of the social order. After centuries, Egypt would rise again, subtly different yet recognizably the same. And the scribes would record, and the stonemasons quarry, and the overseers would whip, and we catch a faint echo at a four thousand year remove.I was surprised at how recognizably authoritarian the government of Ancient Egypt was; not because I thought they were in any sense above such things morally, but authoritarianism would be difficult to maintain from the perspective of organization. But organized they undoubtedly were.One of the moments that really caught me was during one of the period periods of disintegration and decline, one of the warlords calling himself Pharoaoh instructed a minion to 'do that thing which you have never done before' which the author interprets as tomb robbing; stripping the valuable grave goods one of the innumerable burial sites happened more and more as nihilism hopelessness and social breakdown eroded Egyptian traditional life.Think of it. From their perspective, they were essentially pulling the soul of a departed venerated ancestor from the afterlife and extinguishing it. It would be something like me going and rifling Ben Franklin's tomb, pulling him from his rest in heaven and snuffing him out. The Egyptians cared deeply about the afterlife and ordered their whole society around mortuary practices--to fall to such a place, where they are eating their seed corn AND dishonoring their hallowed dead--it pained me even to read of it.Wilkingson does what some good historians do--he didn't intrude much. His prose is lively enough without drawing attention to itself, and he escorts you unobtrusively through the high points--only the very highest points, really; in a work covering 32 centuries even great monarchs are compressed to a few short paragraphs. He seems to have few intrusive tics, and I was drawn ever on, even as the narrative darkened, and Egypt came unmoored and fell under the foreign domination that didn't really end until the advent of Nasser.I will be seeking out more books on this subject. That is one of the highest praises one can offer a work of history.
review 2: An exciting history book comprising the whole Egypt's ancient history - from 4500 B.C. up to Cleopatra and the Roman conquest. One reads it like a novel... The author is depicting the profiles of pharaohs, their courtiers but also of common ancient Egyptians, as well as their foreign contemporaries who had to deal with Egypt. Worth of recommending to every reader with enough imagination and interest in culture! less

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