That would be an accurate assessment. But histories of Egypt are extremely rare.
Is reading history difficult?
- Thread starter Mouthwash
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That would be an accurate assessment. But histories of Egypt are extremely rare.
Think so? Alrighty, just search for a history on Google, Amazon, or run through the Wikipedia sources on Ancient Egypt (any page for any period or Kingdom). You won't find a book I haven't examined and considered. I've went through a textbook for reading materials and found nothing new.
Just list every one you can find. I'll tell you, in detail, my exact thought process upon finding it, where I've seen it listed, and why I rejected it.
Point being, I'm right.
Alright, this one. Of course you can't write a history without including political events, especially if those events are unknown to the readership at large. You can't write a social history of England without reference to the reign of Victoria, the Reformation, the World Wars, and so on. Indeed, in most ancient history, the overwhelming amount of evidence which exists is about kings and treaties and wars, and it would be wrong to leave that out.
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Entirely agree on the troop movements, and more generally, maps are often insufficient. I know it isn't necessarily easy to create a good map, but when particular locations are key to understanding what's going on, it's really necessary.
The abbreviations, to me it depends on how many different ones there are. If it's just a few, and the non-abbreviated form is mentioned a few times so it sinks in, no problem. If the book is about the New Deal, there are probably way too many acronyms.
Generally though, it really depends on the book. A well-written book about a subject that interests me can be quite enjoyable to read and easy to finish fairly quickly. But there are a lot of history books that focus nearly entirely on the facts and very little on making the presentation palatable. One of my [very good] history teachers joked that if we were having trouble sleeping, we should read a chapter from our history textbook. And while it was chock-full of information, and actually not as dry as some other books, it was true that it was not a book that you could sit down and read for several hours without becoming quite drowsy. It's the sort of book that worked quite well for an elective class where the students were already in history and the book was supplemented by high-quality lectures, but like many other books, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who wasn't already interested in the subject, or was reading it for pleasure.
Ancient Egypt is not my area of expertise nor an area of particular interest to me, so I'll leave the specifics of that to Valka and others who are more knowledgeable about it.
I'm reading that book right now, actually. I'm rather optimistic. Next on my list is Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
It sounds more like archival documents than actual written history.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
"Jejune travesty"? Bloody hell.
Verbose
Deity
Oh, it is...
But it's still historiographically interesting. Ancient Egyptian history is haunted by the fact that western historians since the 19th c. has been forced to try to piece it together lacking any real master narrative. It somehow hasn't really worked yet. Histories of the reign of pharaoh X can typically read as a list of references to the inscriptions by this monarch found, with not even an attempt at synthesis or narrative. There's too often just not enough stable context to make the poor hapless egyptologist dare try his hand at it.
The fact that there are precious few professional Egyptologists in the world wouldn't seem to help either. It's a very limited pool to draw from.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
Geopolitical history of Egypt strikes me as fairly sparse before the New Kingdom. Some of the internal dynastic/political struggles (particularly in the Middle and New Kingdoms) are a bit meatier, but need the context of religion and society that Egyptian history usually focuses on. Really not sure how one could read a history of Egypt that leaves all that out.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Why are you reading it then?
I already read it. It's frankly the only one I could get through.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
How about Civilization Before Greece and Rome by HWF Saggs? I haven't actually read it (although I think I own it), but I read his book on Assyria and I think it covers some of the things you're looking for.
It's also a broader topic so you get more for your money.
It's also a broader topic so you get more for your money.
sydhe
King of Kongs
I enjoyed Susan Wise Bauer's "The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome." She spends a lot of time trying to work history out of the scraps of documents and legends we have from the earliest times, including Egypt, Mesopotamia and China (to the point where she kinds of zooms through Greece and Rome). She's continued through the medieval and renaissance worlds, which I have to find.
I'm going to give that a shot.
