Before the bling

If you read the first volume of John Romer’s A History of Egypt, which traces events along the Nile from prehistory to the pyramid age, you will understand why he thinks Egyptology is not a science. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to be exact about anything when most of your knowledge is based on deduction and when new discoveries can overturn accepted theories. In the 1,000 years covered in this second volume, starting around 2600 BC, would it be easier for Romer to present facts and express certainty — to be scientific?

One of the surprises of the pyramid age, as Romer explains very clearly here, is the lack of information concerning what people believed in and even how they lived. For while the Great Pyramid and its many neighbours from the same era stand as eloquent testimony to the capabilities of the ancient Egyptians, they tell us little about how or why they were constructed. This, in part, explains the appeal of what some Egyptologists call the pyramidiots, people who have suggested that the pyramids were built by spacemen or that their massive stones were sung into place.

So why read a book on the subject? For one thing, because although Romer doesn’t have all the answers, he has spent much of his 75 years engaged with Egypt’s past and he has a command of material and of language that makes this a fascinating tale. In the first volume he charted the social and political effects of climate change, as the land beyond the Egyptian Nile valley turned from savannah to desert, leaving people in the region entirely dependent on the river and its annual flood. This second volume looks at the achievements of the first pharaonic state, at its decline and its revival in the Middle
Kingdom.