The Egyptians - Cyril Aldred

From the days of the Greek historian Herodotus, Ancient Egypt has held a strong fascination for different generations of travellers and other observers from Europe. Their lively curiousity has fathered the European science of Egyptology which during the last century brilliantly rediscovered the Egyptian past. Egyptology, however, has had to pay the price for choosing the Romantic sunrise in which to be born, and a light which is not wholly of this world continues to play around the subject, obscuring as much as illuminating it. The little that reaches the layman only tends to underline Herodotus' words that Egypt contains more wonders than any other country. Here sensational finds seem commonplace, rich treasure is frequently uncovered in dramatic circumstances, the remote past seems compulsively present.

But it is only because unique climatic conditions in Egypt have favoured the preservation of so much of its antiquity that we retain an impression that everything was larger than life-size. As far as its material culture was concerned, Egypt must have differeed less in kind than in degree from contemporary Bronze Age civilisations of the Near East of which only the scantiest traces now remain. The peculiar character of Egyptian civilization was derived rather from its special geographical environment and the structure of its society.  It is chiefly these aspects, the ancient people in their ancient places, that Cyril Aldred here discusses. His approach is as much sociological as archaeological and is concerned more with the character of the Pharaonic civilization that with its outward appearance.

The story which he tells in so vivid a manner is enhanced by over eighty photographs, selected with a view to underlining the salient features of the text.