Customer Reviews

Nefertiti Lived Here

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

 

 

Mary Chubb's writing is highly readable and engaging. Her memoir opens on a dreary 1929 February morning in Bloomsbury England, when she finds herself in the basement of the local Egyptological Society offices as the secretary searching for some lost file. She finds instead an ancient Egyptian tile, taken from a dig at Tell el Amarna and stored in the Society's offices with the sand from Egypt still on it.

That one little tile sparks her imagination to travel to Egypt with the next expedition and what follows is a fantastic true story of her adventures on the archaeological dig in the Heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten and his lovely Queen Nefertiti's city.

I have rarely read such a lovely, lighthearted but factual account of someone's travels. A witty, fast-paced book that reads much like a novel, I highly recommend Nefertiti Lived Here to anyone interested in Egypt, memoirs or travel writing in general.

It's been a few years since I've read this book (from library), and was very sorry to find that, at the time, it was long out of print.
I'm glad to see that someone has taken enough interest to republish!

The first reviewer is right; it's not so much about Nefertiti as the ruins at Amarna (Ankhetaten), from the Amarna Period of Egypt. It's a sort of memoir, from Mary Chubb's point of view, of one particular excavation in Tel el-Amarna.

If you're interested in Ankhenaten and Nefertiti, suppositions on how they lived their life, guesses on how Tuthankhamen (king tut) was related to them, and how an expedition of a reletively new site is carried out, this is a very good book to read. But I'll warn you: it has far more to do with the archeology and the ruins than it has to do with Nefertiti herself.

Nefertiti lived in Amarna. Nefertiti lived here. Get it?

This is a short, kind of slapdash memoir of a brief time spent on an archeological dig upstream of Cairo in Egypt during the year 1930.
The author was brought in as a kind of secretary cum general dogsbody.
It is a charmingly told tale, if a bit sketchy in detail more impressionistic actually, but generally a good, light read.
The included illustrations in the form of line drawings are especially appreciated and one wishes there had been more; a bit like the story itself, actually.

When I was 12 years old and cleaning out the basement, I found this book in a box and read it out of curiosity. It turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong fascination with ancient Egypt. The author was fortunate to spend time on a dig at what is perhaps Egypt's most interesting archaeological site - Tell el Amarna, the ancient capital of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh. Still, over 40 years later, the book is a vivid memory. Mary Chubb's story of her experiences, the history of the site, and the discoveries made by her team will draw you in instantly. You may soon find yourself devouring every book you can find on ancient Egypt. What fun you'll have!

Read carefully the book description. This is not a story of Nefertiti, but one of Mary Chubb. If you look for clues on the Amarna period and the Bible a few page are interresting.