A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom
This book meticulously constructs a scholarly account of ancient Egypt from 2625 BC to 1660 BC from the scant and incomplete archeological discoveries, while also providing new insights into an oft-misdefined culture.
When a book has a bibliography of over 100 pages, you know it’s well-researched. However, while Romer spends copious pages debunking 200 years of theories, this method doesn’t validate the conclusions. For example, at the end of the Old Kingdom, burial temples were destroyed and burned, and mummies removed from their sarcophaguses. Romer argues against civil unrest and uprisings as the reason, instead saying this happened because the people didn’t want their lands inhabited by their ancestors and the ancestral images from a no-longer-functioning social system. To desecrate sacred burials because people wanted to “move on”? This sounds farfetched, especially since intermediate-period kings mimicked Old Kingdom tombs when constructing their own. While evidence is sparse in the few paragraphs Romer writes about this topic, how he comes to his conclusions is absent. Romer also spends no time on Djedefre’s pyramid and its misunderstood history.
I was very excited about this book, but the end left me with less knowledge about ancient Egyptian culture. Was that the book’s goal?
