Customer Reviews

Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (World Mythology)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was the perfect start-off point for my thesis research on ancient Egypt. It goes into an amazing amount of depth on a broad range of the spiritual aspects of ancient Egypt while remaining interesting and brief. Not only has Pinch fit an amazing catalog of information which I've found hard to come across in such mass in any other text, but she takes care to reference and suggest a wealth of texts to turn to next for more detailed information on any given topic in the book. For anyone who is either curious of or finds themselves in a position where they need to know more about the gods and customs of ancient Egypt, this is the perfect learner's guide.

Wonderful beginners' book to start a life long "love" of history and mythology. Makes for a great "rainy" day reader. My granddaughter is especially fond of stories from this book. An easy read with good information.

I wanted to do some personal research on Egyptian mythology and this book covered almost all the questions I had. I greatly enjoyed reading it.

The opening chapters of Pinch's book are fantastic: her explanation of Egyptian concepts of time, religion and culture is among the best I have read on the subject. With this foundation, she then goes into detail of differences (in the Egyptian understanding of the cosmos) between "linear time" and "cyclical time" (the ancient Egyptians were big on duality: night / day, good / bad, male / female, and of course, linear / cyclical reckonings of time.) The first 100 pages are really worth the price of the book for this reason.

The remaining 200-ish pages are an encyclopedia of sorts, the symbols, dieties and broader concepts of Egyptian beliefs are explained and cross-referenced. While this was interesting in and of itself (as encyclopedias tend to be), there is no narrative "thread" that ties this together other than how these dieties relate to the broader cosmological world of ancient Egypt. For this reason, I deducted a star.

In all, it is a very good guide to understanding the literature and culture of ancient Egypt, and I highly recommend it on these grounds alone. One caveat, however - my first copy for some reason, had a printing error, where pages 82 - 114 were missing; (pages 57 - 82 were duplicated in its place), therefore skipping some of the meatiest parts of the book. (The book store I bought my copy from was gracious enough to replace it.) Caveat emptor.

I enjoyed the content of the book but would have liked more pictures of gods & goddesses. I wanted to be able to identify them on temple & tomb walls in Egypt. I felt it gave me a solid foundation in Egyptian mythology though.

This book is a very good read. Came in perfect condition. Very pleased with the speed of service. the parcel came within a month from america. Amazon always had good postage time

I was expecting more from this book. Yes, it did contain some great info, but it was so dry and quite frankly, boring at some points, it took forever to get through, and I wouldn't want to read it again. It does have a godd index about gods/goddesses in the back, but this is not for pleasure reading at all. If you enjoy reading manuels and textbooks, you will enjoy it more than I did.

A good companion to Greek mythology. I recommend it to all.

/Torbjörn Jerlerup