It takes talent as well as scholarship to summarise Egypt's ancient history in a readable and accessible form T G H James's The British Museum Concise Introduction: ANCIENT EGYPT has now been published in a paperback edition which makes for a concise yet comprehensive and up-to-date survey which is easy to handle, writes Jill Kamil. Egyptology has become so specialised that the ordinary lay reader today can seldom find an introduction that takes in all that is important about the ancient Egyptian civilisation from its foundation up to the Roman period. Scholars in the first half of the 20th century -- James Breasted, John Wilson and Alan Gardiner among them -- wrote surveys of Egyptian history that were read by both the scholarly and lay public. This is no longer so. Modern technology makes it easy to produce specialist books with contributions by several scholars on a single subject or period of ancient history. Thus we find numerous studies on the Old Kingdom and the Pyramids, Middle Kingdom documents, the New Kingdom's Tutankhamun and Ramses II, books on the pre-dynastic period, on art, architecture and sculpture, on women in ancient Egypt, on make-up and herbal remedies, as well as collections of artefacts in various museums. But when it comes to a concise and readable survey one is hard-pressed to find one. James's Ancient Egypt fills this much-needed gap. In a new preface, James presents what he claims is "a little originality in that [the book] incorporates many of the ideas that I have formulated but never fully developed in more than fifty years of considering the ancient peoples of Egypt, their history, their monuments and artistic productions, and above all their writings which have survived over many millennia." He has divided the book into eight essays that give a survey of many aspects of Egyptian life and culture "offered from my own particular viewpoint", and herein lies the real value of this book. The book is comprehensive, but not conventional, and as the author himself admits, "some ideas may be thought unusual... [the book] is intended to stimulate, and especially to encourage further exploration of what has been my thrilling field of enquiry throughout a long career." James's Ancient Egypt provides a chapter on "The Dynastic Sequence", but its coverage of the river and desert, reading and writing, records of the official word, faith in its many forms, provision for the afterlife, builders and decorators, and the mastery of crafts, is what makes it such fascinating reading. As is clearly worded on the cover blurb, this book is "distilled from the latest discoveries, fieldwork, and research... the book makes a stimulating starting point for anyone studying or visiting Egypt." The book is, moreover, supported by a wealth of reference information, including an annotated list of important museum collections, a king-list with a selection of illustrated royal cartouches, and the 170 illustrations, many in colour, are well-placed within the text. It takes a scholar like T G H James, retired keeper of the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan in the British Museum, with his long and intimate association with Egypt and Egyptian monuments, to produce a work of this calibre. James has witnessed a remarkable growth in popular interest in Egypt during that time, and he has, in addition, what all too few scholars possess -- a talent for writing a text that is interesting and which makes for easy browsing. Here are none of the familiar clichés about the ancient Egyptian civilisation, yet neither is the writing controversial nor bland. I read every word to the last sentence of the last chapter on "The mastery of crafts", which I quote with delight: "It is not our purpose here to discriminate between arts and crafts; the Egyptians certain did not recognise a difference. High standards generate high achievement; where such is the case, masterpieces will be made from time to time. So it happened in ancient Egypt." T G H James, The British Museum Concise Introduction ANCIENT EGYPT, 2005, The American University in Cairo Press. By Jill Kamil
