From The Great Pyramid To The Fall Of The Middle Kingdom A History Of Ancient Egypt 2 1st Edition John Romer by John Romer 9781466849594, 1466849592 instant download after payment.

The first volume of this history described the creation of the pharaonic state and ended at around 2550 BC with the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. For the most part it was a silent history, since hardly any writings have survived which illuminate that millennial process. This second volume, alternatively, moves into an altogether noisier era for it begins as the archaic silence of those early pyramids is slowly broken by a growing chatter of hieroglyphic texts and it ends at around 1770 BC, with the pharaonic state in full bloom and with its scribes having created an elegant courtly literature.
The timelines of the two volumes do not meet at a single point but are spliced together at an angle across the century in which the Great Pyramid was built and at the time when the use of texts and inscriptions had started to increase. The history in this second volume, therefore, is different from that of Volume 1, for the growing presence of those texts allows the possibility of ancient thought as expressed in written language to become part of the main narrative.
History, it is commonly observed, is a dialogue between past and present worlds. As far as the modern history of ancient Egypt is concerned, where ancient texts have always been the key, it is essentially a dialogue between those ancient texts and the two centuries of Western scholarship that have followed their decipherment. A dialogue so commanding that the attitudes and opinions of a handful of leading Western academics are as much a part of modern ‘ancient Egypt’ as are the pyramids of Giza.