History of ancient Egypt : an introduction

Transl. by David Lorton of Grundz�ge der �gyptischen Geschichte, c1978 by Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt.

The archaic period. The Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom. The New Kingdom. The late period

'When we in modern times encounter ancient Egypt, whether as an exotic culture or as one ultimately related to our own, we never fail to be astonished by the tranquillity of things Egyptian, by the petrified and hierarchic organization the Egyptians imposed upon their world thousands of years ago....With the refining of method and the acquisition of new sources, chronology can shrink an uneventful millennium into a lively century, while acquaintance with the ancient Egyptian concept of history warns us against understanding the monotonous repetitions and stock formulas of "historical" texts as a reflection of real history. For people in those ancient times, history was not a social or economic process but rather cultic practice and ritual drama, with the result that their "historical" texts conceal rather more from us than they communicate....' --Preface

Hardcover