Seven thousand years ago, civilization began percolating in Egypt. Archeologists have found evidence written in stone all over the old royal haunts of the Egyptian kings and queens. Abandoned administrative edifices and tombs are the Facebook of those times. Knowledge of the first true Egyptian King is based on the discovery of what is known as the Narmer Pallette, a stone carving showing King Narmer (what else?) smiting his enemies. Later narratives written on the stone structures allow us to piece together not only history but also attitudes, power plays, battle plans, and ways of life.
We know that the civilization of Egypt revolved around the Nile River in North Africa. In this primarily desert region, the river’s annual flooding of it banks made them incredibly fertile for farming, which not only allowed the Egypt to feed itself sumptuously, but also to produce a massive surplus with which it could trade for goods, valuables, power, and influence.
While the book initially takes us back seven thousand years, the young author quickly fast forwards to 1922 when Englishman Howard Carver announced to the world that he discovered King Tutankhamen’s un-robbed tomb in the Valley of the Kings, arguably the greatest discovery in the history of archeology. The world held its breath when three years later Carter opened the tomb revealing, in his words, “wonderful things,” including art objects, a solid gold funeral mask, and ultimately the mummy of the boy king himself. The story still rivets today.
Author Wilkinson, recipient of numerous awards and a professor at Cambridge College, writes in an upbeat style and relates the events of thousands of years ago as if they are a part of the current social/political landscape, which in some respects they are. With the perspective the author provides, the reader realizes not much has changed: the same intrigue, romance, danger, sex, and shenanigans are still making news today; they’re just not, for the most part, carved in stone.
Naturally, Wilkinson dwells on the pyramids, intriguing monuments to antiquity if there ever were any. He speculates why they were built (the “uncomfortable answer is that [they] were the ultimate projection of absolute power”), but also gives us ideas of how they were built. Theories range from unorthodox building materials (the blocks were made of a sort of ancient concrete); sound waves moved the 20-ton granite blocks; and/or the builders were from Atlantis and other planets. But the truth, Wilkinson says, is even more amazing: they are the projection of “super-human authority.” Wilkinson convinces us that ancient Egypt one-pointedly focused its entire energy on building these great monuments, something few civilizations have done. Its singularly autocratic form of government led artisans, craftsmen, workers, and administrators on a quest to design and build tombs and temples of unprecedented grandeur and splendor.
Oh, exactly how they were built? Well, no evidence has ever been discovered of ancient astronauts helping out or magical forces lifting the granite blocks, but archeologists have discovered entire towns which housed the workers, plus their tools, workshops, streets, and homes.
While one can get lost in the author’s descriptions of the edifices of ancient Egypt, Wilkinson’s interpretation of court life equally intrigues and fascinates.