Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt stands in the great tradition of Breasted but incorporates much new archaeological information. With a literary flair and a sense for a story well told, Mr. Wilkinson offers a highly readable, factually up-to-date account of what we know about Egyptian political history. . . .

Mr. Wilkinson energetically chronicles the deeds of the great kings [and] . . . also brings us, intimately sometimes, into a world of everyday Egyptians, one revealed only in the last century by the work of scholars systemically studying Egyptian material culture. Documents give glimpses, all too occasionally but clearly, of labor camps, workers strikes and — at the end of the New Kingdom — even robbery of the royal tombs. . . .

Mr. Wilkinson puts too much emphasis on the importance of the dynasties. This is still the norm in Egyptian history, but it does not tell us much about the driving forces of historical change, which included climatic crises — manifested in wild Nile flooding — and exogenous shocks such as invasion. . . .

Elsewhere in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, Mr. Wilkinson rightly stresses the brutal nature of the Egyptian state. "Autocratic regimes," he says, "live and die by force, and ancient Egypt was no exception." "The most chilling example of this tendency," he suggests, "can be seen in the tombs of Egypt's early rulers . . . where dismembered bodies of several individuals had clearly been interred with the tomb owner." . . .

Mr. Wilkinson's account shares with Breasted's one unfortunate flaw — epitomized by this book's title. Mr. Wilkinson sees the first millennium as one of great decline, a "fall" from a supposed golden age. . . . But in fact this was a crucial period in the evolution of Egyptian civilization. . . . [It] saw the first Greek merchants and soldiers arrive in Egypt, the introduction of coinage and (as Herodotus tells us) the circumnavigation of Africa. A period of change, no doubt. But "change and decay," as Mr. Wilkinson has it? I demur.