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

This extraordinary book draws on a lifetime of research and thought to tell one of the greatest of all human stories: how, over a thousand years and more a culture of semi- itinerant farmers created a rich, vivid, strange world that had its first culmination in the pharaoh Khufu building the Great Pyramid, one of the most astounding of all human-made landmarks.

John Romer immerses the reader in this fascinating world, showing how archaeological evidence has allowed this long vanished civilization to gradually re-appear from under the sand, and the changing interpretations to which its breathtaking but entirely enigmatic remains have been subjected.

Deeply suspicious of the grand narratives fabricated by the Victorian pioneers and the revisions proposed by modern cultural theorists, Romer focuses instead on what these long-buried and highly idiosyncratic objects have to tell us in their own right, shorn of attempts to entangle them in globalising fantasies of savages, of ancient wars and merciless kings.