Different Perspectives Of The Ancient Egyptians

Historians record history in different ways. History textbooks only state facts, but they do not analyze the events that they discuss. Three concepts that are an important aspect of every civilization are art, transportation, and politics because they reflect the culture and the inner workings of a society or group. These topics are individually tackled by each author in their respective text. Each author has their own unique way of telling the story of ancient Egypt, but they allow for these areas to interconnect with each other by tracing them back to several simple common grounds within the texts. By reading these book reviews, one can illuminate and truly discover both the authors’ similar and different approaches.

Gay Robins is the author of a book titled The Art of Ancient Egypt that discusses the art produced by the ancient Egyptians. Robins is an Egyptologist and she acquired a Ph. D. degree at Oxford University in 1981. She is a member of the Egypt Exploration Society, International Association Egyptologists, and she is part of the College Art Association. She enjoys researching ancient Egyptian art, writing, and issues of gender and sexuality. Her other publications bring up unique and under-the-radar topics that pertain to Egypt. Her other works are centralized around women in ancient Egypt, royal Egyptian women in the 18th dynasty, Egyptian mathematics, human proportions in Egyptian art and in life, and she addresses issues pertaining to gender in Egyptian art.

Gay Robins believes “that we need a book that can tell us ‘why art was so important to the ancient Egyptians. . . and how they functioned within and in relation to the social structure of ancient Egypt and its religious system’”. She really wanted to get the reader to truly experience what role art played in ancient Egyptian culture. This book is intended to be of use to both students and scholars that are captivated by the field of ancient Egyptian art. Comparable to how Robins focused on royal women and gender issues in her other Egyptian-centered works, the author used specially chosen “artifacts that placed a special emphasis on previously neglected subjects”. This included pieces that didn’t look the most pleasing to the eye and highlighted the relics that gave “the reader a unique chance to broaden his/her idea of the range of Egyptian art”. The author also has a strong “emphasis on certain lesser known periods of Egyptian art history”. For example, she covers substantially more on the rarely-covered topics like the “First Intermediate Period” and the “Twenty-first Dynasty to the Ptolemaic period”, compared to other authors that devoted little time to these topics. Gay Robins uses “extensive descriptions and explanations of the [excessive amount of] illustrations” in The Art of Ancient Egypt. This really helps students and amateurs get a better grip on what the author is trying to portray. “The presentation of all these meticulously chosen materials of art, finally, provides the reader with a clear view of the development of art in ancient Egypt, which can be seen as a history of social norms and cultural values, as the author successfully weaves discussions of social, political, and religious contexts of each period into the text”.

Robert Partridge is the author of a book titled Transport in Ancient Egypt that discusses the ancient Egyptians’ different varieties of transportation. Robins was awarded a certificate in Egyptology with distinction at the University of Manchester, in conjunction with being a star scholar at the university. He was the chairman of the Manchester Ancient Egypt Society, elected to aid the Egypt Exploration Society, and he undertook the editorship of the magazine, Ancient Egypt. When Robins was nine years old when he found a nineteenth-century brass ashtray from Egypt. This was the spark that ignited his obsession and love of Egypt. When Robins was aware that he was dying of cancer, he made sure that the physical legacy of his library, photographs, high-quality replicas of ancient Egyptian artifacts would go on to aid Egyptology. Robert Partridge “set out to collect information on all aspects of transportation in ancient Egypt, and he appropriately focused on the extraordinary collection of ancient vessels and vehicles” (Ward 220, 2000). Ward compares Partridge’s book to “a well-intentioned tour guide providing interesting tidbits on the subject and a few errors”.

Comparable to Robins’ The Art of Ancient Egypt, Transport in Ancient Egypt is meant to be read by a general audience. Partridge used clear and accurate basic information and useful illustrations to help guide the reader through his text. He also added a glossary of specific terms for watercraft and chariots, maps, and an index to help the reader decipher his book. Partridge gave some attention to the rarely discussed commoners of ancient Egypt. He talked about “walking and sandals […], and a section on carrying chairs that provides information about status and society”. Ward admits that “Transport in Ancient Egypt succeeds in providing a general introduction to a subject of tremendous importance in understanding the way people lived and worked”. “Uniting a study of watercraft and human, animal and wheeled traffic on land into a single volume is ambitious”, but Partridge brought forth errors from earlier works into his text and he was not able to pull it off.

Marc Van De Mieroop is the author of a book titled A History of Ancient Egypt that focuses on the general history and the complicated political history of the ancient Egyptians. Van De Mieroop “is a specialist of the history of the ancient Near East from the beginning of writing to the age of Alexander of Macedon” (Van De Mieroop, 2018). He obtained his Ph. D. at Yale University in 1983, his M. A. at Yale University in 1980, and his B. A. Katholieke Universiteit in 1978. “He is the Director of Columbia’s Center for the Ancient Mediterranean and Founding Editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History”. He is currently teaching at Columbia University, and he previously taught at the University of Oxford, and at Yale University. Van De Mieroop wrote over one hundred articles and reviews, and he has published many books on numerous features of ancient near-eastern history, Egyptian history, and world history.

Van De Mieroop begins his text by setting the stage for ancient Egyptian history in relation to its environmental and cultural contexts. Contrasting many other texts, Van De Mieroop tries not to use a sequential approach and the “simplistic divisions of the ancient king lists in order to emphasize the often untidy nature of Egypt’s political development”. Each chapter that Van De Mieroop wrote is accompanied with a summary of dynastic history, which chronologically lays out certain people and events that the author decided to discuss in a specific time period. He uses an “engaging style”, and he has a very methodic way of organizing his text. Van De Mieroop knew what to include and what to leave out in order to make the text be very understandable concise to a wide audience. Van De Mieroop’s A History of Ancient Egypt provides the right combination of detail and range to “make it an ideal college level textbook, but it will equally provide a thoroughly up-to-date sourcebook for anyone who wishes to better understand and appreciate Egypt’s sweeping political saga”. He supplies the reader with a plethora of helpful line drawings, maps, photographs, architectural plans, and sites throughout his book.

Several of authors’ writing styles seem to overlap with one another. For example, all three of the authors used extensive amounts of guidance for the reader to follow along with, such as the illustrations and maps in their respective books. All of the authors tried to be unique by addressing non-mainstream ideas and subjects. For example, Partridge gave a mention to the rarely addressed common-folk of ancient Egypt. Partridge’s work contrasted the other two authors’ because he did not address very specific topics as the other two did. Partridge gave a very broad overview of transportation in ancient Egypt. All three of them gave mention to how their topic related to the social norms and culture of the time. Marc Van De Mieroop was a great deal more organized within his text than the other two. Robins spent the most amount of time dedicated to giving the lime-light to the unpopular events and concentrations. These three authors wrote about the history of ancient Egypt in very unique yet occasionally parallel ways.