Ancient Egypt

"Yes. This is, to my mind, one of the most original pieces of scholarship on Ancient Egypt published in the last 50 years – and there is a particular connection to me, because the author, Barry Kemp, was my lecturer at university. He also supervised my doctoral thesis, so I know him very well. But that is not the reason I chose the book! I chose it because, as its name suggests, it is a brilliant dissection of Ancient Egypt – using not the surgeon’s scalpel, but the archaeologist’s trowel, if you like. It goes beneath the skin of Ancient Egypt and examines what made that civilisation tick. And it is so full of original insights; Barry Kemp is a really original thinker. He looks at archaeological evidence in an extraordinary way. So, for example, when he is looking at early temples, Barry is not afraid to have an educated guess and reconstruct a very plausible picture of early religious life in Ancient Egypt, which fits all the archaeological evidence beautifully, but is also very imaginative. Another great thing about the book, and a reason I think so many people love it, is that it is full of wonderful illustrations. They are just about the most useful illustrations in any academic book on Ancient Egypt, and they are all by Barry Kemp himself. They really bring complicated subjects alive. For anyone who wants to get beneath the surface of Ancient Egypt, it is a fascinating discussion and analysis. This is the extraordinary thing. The first edition of Barry Kemp’s book was published in 1989, and the second edition came out 16 years later, and there is so much new information in the second edition; this only emphasises to me just how rapidly the subject is moving on. There have been dozens of new excavations, and because Barry is the doyen of Egyptian archaeology, he has his finger right on the pulse of all the new work that is going on. For example, if you look at the excavations in the north-eastern Delta at Tell ed-Daba, which was home to an Asiatic line of pharaohs called the Hyksos, who invaded Egypt in about 1650 BC, there is this very distinctive Palestinian culture with all sorts of weird and wonderful things that you never usually find in Egypt. And the way that Barry takes that site and brings it to life to illuminate a very peculiar episode in Ancient Egyptian history is just brilliant."