John Romer

In this engaging and ambitious work, John Romer aims to refocus the gaze of the non-specialist away from the Pharaonic period (about which there are any number of popular histories) onto the Neolithic, and the growth of a centralised Egyptian state. He traces fifteen hundred years of development, from the emergence of farming communities along the route of the Nile to the creation of the sophisticated administrative, transport and supply systems which allowed the construction of the Great Pyramid. His approach is avowedly archaeological, aiming to get away from the priviledging of textual court-focused history, and stressing the role and lives of the ordinary peoples of Egypt.

From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

A History of Ancient Egypt

This extraordinary book draws on a lifetime of research and thought to tell one of the greatest of all human stories: how, over a thousand years and more a culture of semi- itinerant farmers created a rich, vivid, strange world that had its first culmination in the pharaoh Khufu building the Great Pyramid, one of the most astounding of all human-made landmarks. John Romer immerses the reader in this fascinating world, showing how archaeological evidence has allowed this long vanished civilization to gradually re-appear from under the sand, and the changing interpretations to which its breathtaking but entirely enigmatic remains have been subjected. Deeply suspicious of the grand narratives fabricated by the Victorian pioneers and the revisions proposed by modern cultural theorists, Romer focuses instead on what these long-buried and highly idiosyncratic objects have to tell us in their own right, shorn of attempts to entangle them in globalising fantasies of savages, of ancient wars and merciless kings. The result is an engrossing detective story, as the reader becomes ever more engaged in how we have come to know what we do about the astounding achievements of Nile civilization - and where the record remains silent.--

A History of Ancient Egypt From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

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