Customer Reviews

See Inside an Egyptian Town

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This book is part of a well-known children's series to introduce ancient ways of life in an enjoyable, colorful format. The illustrations, with full-color cut-away drawings of homes and palaces, are excellent and fascinating.

However, there is a troubling amount of misinformation in this book. The most glaring example of this is the section entitled "Workmen's Village." The book states that the tomb workers who cut and decorated the tombs were all slaves, criminals and violent characters and that they all lived confined to a prison-like walled city far from the "civilized life" of nearby Akhetaten. Unless things were completely different at Akhetaten, from the evidence of the workmen's village at Deir el-Medina near Thebes, the artists and workmen who built and decorated the tombs were esteemed members of Egyptian society. Workmen's villages were certainly not prisons--they were filled with educated scribes with a level of literacy far above that of the usual Egyptian villages, and the people had freedom to come and go, worship their gods and celebrate their festivals. Much research has been done on the workmen who built the tombs, and this book's stereotypical and misinformed view of how these beautiful monuments were built is a great disservice to the ancient Egyptians. For better information, please see Pharaoh's Workers by Leonard H. Lesko, and The Tomb-Builders of the Pharaohs by Morris Bierbrier.

The workmen's village at Akhetaten had only a brief existence and it ended by being used to house the policemen who patrolled the nearby cemeteries.

I'm quite disappointed with this book and would not recommend it for children unless a parent or teacher makes an effort do some extra reading and clarify its inaccuracies to the child.

This small but colorful book is part of the See Inside series, which gives the young reader a look into life in a different time, through the use of colorful illustrations and cutaway peeks behind the scenes. This particular book looks at life in the city of Akhetaten in the second millennium B.C., showing how the city was laid out, how its houses were build, and how its people lived and worked. The final section of the book is an interesting two-page chronology that gives some highlights of world history from 3100 to 50 B.C.

As might be expected with a book published in 1986, some of the information in this book has been superseded by later findings. But, I do think that the importance of this book is not the text (of which there is rather little), but in the excellent pictures and cutaways looks into Egyptian architecture. If you, or your young reader, are interested in what the world of ancient Egyptians really looked like, and what their homes looked like, then I highly recommend this book to you. I really enjoyed this book and think that you will too.