A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

Given its continuing and unrivalled popularity, you might imagine that there are many good contemporary histories of ancient Egypt: in fact, they are extremely rare. Certainly, you would never guess that since the 1960s some brilliant academic research has revolutionized our understanding of the ancient past, or that a series of ongoing archaeological excavations is presently reshaping an entire millennium of ancient Egypt’s early history. Instead of making modern histories, most writers unthinkingly insert the products of a century and more of the most meticulous scientific research into narratives founded in nineteenth-century theories about human nature and the rise and fall of nation-states. So ‘ancient Egypt’ yet labours in a European bondage of a grand scholarly tradition, and it is subject to both the vices and virtues of that most powerful heritage.
The first great modern history of ancient Egypt was published in Paris in the 1730s and had a huge and immediate effect. Written by an elderly rector of the city university, it was swiftly translated into all the major European languages and continuously reprinted in dozens of different editions and for so long, that the last English edition of Mr Rollin’s Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians appeared in 1924!