Customer Reviews

The World of the Pharaohs: A Complete Guide to Ancient Egypt

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

 

 

Christine Hobson's book is very good. I used it as a textbook for class, but found that the subjects in the book read more like a novel. There is humor, and concentrations on art, daily life, writings, individual archaeologists, etc. It is very interesting, and covers so many subjects!

I always believed ancient Egyptian culture is the zenith point of the human kind on its age, their culture was far beyond complex than we believed, and gave birth to greek culture and roman empire's culture and nourished comtemporary cultures.

This book is an essential for an ancient egypt culture beginner and more, even it's an intermediate book for egypt it's very good on making you grasp egyptian heritage chronologically, informative and clear, easy reading. Very good covering of ancient egyptian culture.

I definetely recommend this book if you are a starter. It has plenty of pictures, diagrams which are adequate and correctly chosen for understanding egypt. It even has a hieroglyph reading section. But this book is scholarly minded and organized carefully. Not for magic or egyptian extraterrestrial mambo-jambo seekers nor serious researchers of egypian cryptology and mystery. Oh! Should I say thank you Ms. Hobson.

I have given this book only 2 stars to adjust the 2 x 5 star reviews (these reviews being the reason why I bought the book). This book is not "The world of the Pharaohs" rather "The world of Egyptian Archaeologists and Egyptologists. There is almost as much text on these people than on the Pharaohs and after a while becomes annoying. Also "A complete history to Ancient Egypt" is not possible in 192 pages.
The book is Ok as an introduction if one understands and accepts the authors fascination with the Egyptologists etc., but there is very little background to the Pharaohs and Ancient Egyptian details in general (which is clear with the limited number of pages). I found myself checking for real background in Wikipedia, which shows how it should be done.
There must be much better books out there, that concentrate on the facts of the period and the civilization of Eygpt and not the 19th and 20th century discoverers of it.