Barbara Sewell
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York
1968
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-25454
The book opens with the usual rundown of the environment along the
Nile, and the divisions into which ancient Egyptian history is partitioned.
This short book contains black and white images on most pages; unfortunately
many of these are too dark, though nice color full page photographs are spaced
throughout the book.
This volume is very much suitable for
young readers ten and up. The read moves quickly onto death and the Egyptian
afterlife with some very unusual images including one of all four stoppers from
Tutankhamun's canopic chest. From here the writer moves to the Old Kingdom and
the effective organization of manpower to create statues and stone buildings on
a monumental scale.
After the fall of the Old Kingdom and its
god-kings a period of anarchy followed where nomarchs vied with each other for
power. The king's of the Middle Kingdom were once again effective rulers but
they were no longer seen as god-like. This produced statuary in the Twelfth
Dynasty of king's whose faces were now worn by the heavy burden that rested
upon them.
A series of weak rulers followed creating
the conditions for foreign king's to dominate Lower Egypt while intimidating
the king's of Upper and Middle Egypt. The king's of Thebes Seventeenth Dynasty
took up arms and fought to drive the foreigners from Egypt. It was finally the
Theban King Ahmosis who unified the two lands establishing the New Kingdom, and
her period of empire.
An interesting full color picture of the
statuette of Queen Tetisheri owned by the British Museum appears on page 71,
and on the museums website as a forgery. The great warrior Thutmosis III
expanded Egypt's borders to their greatest extent, making the house of the
Eighteenth Dynasty fabulously wealthy as well as the priests of the god of
Thebes Amun. King's of both the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties contained
rulers like the Nineteenth Dynasty King Ramesses II, and Ramesses III of the
following dynasty who maintained order, but a series of weak kings living short
reigns brought about the end of the empire.
Ms. Sewell presents the society and its
domestic life with more amusing black and white photographs. Ancient Egypt was a barter economy where a worker was paid in food, clothes or any other producible
measure in exchange. A society who's comforts could be acquired through work
and the prosperous population in which their calendar year was dotted with great
festivals among being the Opet festival.
The training of scribes brought with it
the compositions of wisdom literature and admonitions of how to behave with
consideration and good manners. These were to be written over and over again
till the scribe could act on behalf of those in need of letters to be written,
orders verified, tallying commodities and needs of law.
The author relates the discovery of the
hieroglyphic writing by Champollion and others from the ancient monuments
including the Rosetta stone. Ms. Sewell proceeds forward with the
sciences that from mathematics, astronomy, medicine and the calendar year,
created an eternal people living eternal lives.
Today the world’s modern Egyptian
collections are inevitably made up of objects needed for both life and
contentment in the afterlife. These workshop/home crafts range from the
simplest of objects to intricate productions worthy of royal workshops. In
color plate 15 is presented a beautiful well painted scribe statue found in the
Giza necropolis in 1951.
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