Customer Reviews

Magic in Ancient Egypt

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A wonderful book on how the people of ancient Egypt viewed the world around them and the ways they sought to cope. Religion and magic are intertwined in the ancient world, as were magic and medicine. A good book for both the casual reader and the researcher. Full of fascinating bits of information, yet easily understandable. If you're interested in life in ancient Egypt, this book belongs on your bookshelf!

I found this book very informative and interesting.As a practioner of Egyptian Magic and an Anthropology/Archology student,I found it easy to read,and it covers all aspects of Egyptian Magic. Ms.Pinch uses different texts to back up what she writes about.If you are looking for written ritual it's not in the book,but the information is there for you to write your own if you wish.I highly recomend this book to any one interested in Egyptian Magic.Ms.Pinch shows Egypt as it was a civilization which showed no distinction between everyday life and magic.

Pinch delivers a solid book explaining the practical aspects of Ancient Egyptian magic. The book is written so that both an academic and a "normal" ;-) person can easily understand the thought behind the magic.
Check out the terrifying love spell!

The revised edition of Magic in Ancient Egypt provides a fine survey discussing Egyptian techniques for magic, practitioners, and surviving magical texts. From medicine to how influences from early Egyptian magic survived to influence later societies into modern times, this provides a scholarly approach to Egyptian deities: though it's more likely to be picked up by new age collections, serious Egyptian history holdings also need this in-depth survey!

In this work Ms Pinch walks us through various aspects of the study of Egyptian magic as it existed in historical times. The nature and problems of the sources are well discussed as are patterns and techniques which occur in the surviving spells. Above all, the book attempts to place magic within the context of ancient Egypt.

The book is only partially successful (as are all such attempts) but in this case, it is largely because such a study is well beyond the target audience. Nonetheless Ms Pinch provides the best overview of the topic that I have seen of this sort. Among other things the discussion of the nature of the sources of Egyptian myth and magic is quite fascinating. Much of this is not material I had come across, and it allows me to look at the collections of Egyptian mythology that are around today in a different light.

This book largely omits detailed review of the actual corpus of spells and their contents, while addressing instead an overview of various elements instead. Don't expect to find serious philological discussions in this book, but instead expect to find an archaeologically centered overview of the sources of our knowledge on Egyptian magic and a very cursory overview of the techniques and such used.

All in all, this book is something most students of the subject are likely to find useful if for no other reason than that it clarifies the difficulties with the sources. Highly recommended.

Lovely pictures, well-written prose, but organizationally not very exciting. It's written for the non-practitioner (which I am), but lacks the imagination of other books on the same subject.