Read Ancient Egypt: A Complete History

Egypt built for eternity and very nearly achieved it. No other architecture of the ancient world survives in such quantity, such completeness or such legibility: we can walk the full sequence of its temples from quay to sanctuary, read the building accounts carved on its walls, stand in the quarry beside the obelisk that cracked and was abandoned, and descend corridors painted as maps of the night sky. This book follows that architecture across three thousand years — from the mudbrick mastabas of the first kings to Djoser's stone mountain at Saqqara, the perfected pyramids of Giza, the vast accretive temple-city of Karnak, the terraced mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, Akhenaten's dissenting city, the rock-cut wonders of Abu Simbel and the Valley of the Kings, and the late, perfect temples of Edfu, Dendera and Philae. It gives equal weight to the world that built them: the river and the flood, the quarries and the work gangs, the houses of Deir el-Medina and the planned streets of Kahun. And it is honest about evidence: where the method of raising a pyramid or the reason for a change of angle is debated, the debate is stated, because Egypt's buildings reward the reader who separates what the stones prove from what the legends prefer.