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REVIEW BY HILARY WILSON
Any author might be daunted by the ambitious subtitle of the ‘Brief Histories’ format, but Campbell Price has risen to the challenge. In little more than 100 smaller-than-A5 text pages, with only three randomly placed photographic images, he explores such topics as the Egyptian people and their environment, their engagement with their gods and attitudes towards death, the power of the king, Egypt’s place on the international political scene, and the written language through which these ideas have been transmitted to the present.
Campbell’s approach to introducing three millennia of Egypt’s pharaonic history and culture is refreshingly personal, starting with his boyhood encounter with Egypt at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow – the sort of formative experience shared by many Egyptologists, amateur and professional. He examines how first impressions – whether gained from museum visits, books, films or popular culture – can have a lasting effect on our appreciation of the complexities of Egyptian civilisation. Vivid imagery, such as artists’ impressions of buildings or ‘portraits’ based on statues, and preconceptions gained from a reliance on simplistic, outdated or biased thinking have led to a tendency to view the ancient Egyptians through the lens of our own (Western) culture.
In examining the Egyptians’ understanding of their own history and how they marked the passage of time, Campbell stresses the longevity of the pharaonic civilisation compared with other ancient cultures. As he reminds us, Cleopatra VII ‘lived closer in time to us today than she did to the building of the pyramids’. The accounts of Greek and Roman writers and the historical analyses of early Egyptologists are all coloured by the political and colonial attitudes of their time, and yet these are the ‘authorities’ on which the makers of films and documentaries rely for their reconstructions of the past.
In his most telling chapter, Campbell reviews the proliferation of museum Egyptian antiquities collections worldwide. The Napoleonic Survey and its monumental publication Description de l’Égypte brought Egypt to the notice of the West and made Egyptian antiquities collectable. The ‘disproportionate desirability of antiquities from Egypt, above those from almost anywhere else on the planet’ spawned an illegal trade in Egyptian artefacts that continues to this day. The visual appeal of the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the modern mythology of his ‘curse’ turned him into a ‘poster boy’ for Egyptian tourism. Museums ‘respond to and actively drive popular interest in the civilisation’ because, as Campbell points out, ‘Egypt sells’.
This little book could never cover the ‘everything’ that is promised by its title, but it is, as stated in the blurb on the back cover, ‘concise and incredibly readable’.
Win a copy of Campbell’s new book in our competition here.
Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt – Everything you wanted to know but forgot to ask
by Campbell Price
Orion/Seven Dials, 2024
ISBN 978-1-3996-2258-5
Hardback, £12.99
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