Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia

As we are used to in this splendid French series (‘Mondes Anciens’), this is another voluminous and beautifully illustrated book. It seems very solid to me, with a balanced assessment of the available source material and also a stimulating explanation of how views have shifted over the years. Of course, any book based on scientific study about the history of ancient Egypt is super interesting. I am therefore certainly not going to dispute the soundness of this synthesis work. But there are some notable downsides.
To begin with, this is a striking, even almost exclusively politically oriented work. The two authors have turned their focus almost entirely to the pharaohs and the Egyptian elites. That is interesting in itself, but one-sided: economic, social, cultural and religious aspects are almost completely ignored (unlike the excellent part about Mesopotamia in this series, see Robert Lafont. La mésopotamie. De Gilgamesh à Artaban). More than one-third of this book focuses on the non-classical period after 1,000 BCE; that is a good choice because you will not find much of that in other works; only, in this part there is almost exclusive attention to the management of the large temple domains, nothing else; a very strange choice. This book also contains very little original texts, except for what later Greek writers, often very prejudiced, wrote about Ancient Egypt. Finally, this work also lacks editorial: the titles of the chapters really make no sense (for example, the period 2400-2100 is referred to as 'the discovery of freedom'), and in the chapter about the 2nd intermediate period 1750-1504 the thesis of the occupation by the Hyksos is completely undermined, while in subsequent chapters the Hyksos kings are constantly referred to.
In short, this certainly is a valid introduction, but clearly with some issues. More about my first impressions of Ancient Egypt, in my history account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5199588478… (más)