Author: Cyril Aldrin
Ancient Egypt may have been, in the words of a famous epigram, ‘the gift of the Nile’, but the character of Egyptian civilization owed much to her god incarnate, the pharaoh. It is these twin themes – the overwhelming importance of the annual inundation of the Nile and the rise and fall over three thousand years of the power of the divine king – that provide the unifying thread running through this superbly written narrative.
Cyril Aldred’s panoramic survey takes us northwards down the Nile from Nubia to the cities of the Delta; and from the first Stone Age settlements to the climax of Egyptian civilization and its subsequent demise in the Late Period. Jacquetta Hawkes called the first edition of The Egyptians a ‘masterpiece of compression’. Without in any way losing the succinct and lucid qualities of the original, the author has entirely rewritten his text, in so doing almost doubling its length and providing for the student or traveller an indispensable and up-to-date guide to the world of the ancient Egyptians.
One of the most distinguished Egyptologists of our time, Cyril Aldred was from 1961 to 1974 Keeper of the Department of Art and Archaeology at the Royal Scottish Museum Edinburgh.