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List Price: $45.00 | | Publisher: Checkmark Books
Salesrank: 1711351
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| Our Price: $43.00 |
| Used Price: $13.66 |
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| Media: Hardcover |
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Editorial Review:
To its neighbors, Egypt was a land of "gold as plentiful as dust" - a kingdom to be admired and envied, but too powerful to be taken. Other kingdoms rose and fell; Egypt endured. To the early Greeks - who arrived late in Egypt's long history - it was the home of an almost unimaginably ancient written language and equally ancient, mysterious religious traditions that were rumored to hold the secrets of the gods. To the Romans, Egypt was the granary that fed their empire, and a source of strange gods and exotic objects that fascinated everyone from slave to emperor. Only the Arabs, who arrived nearly 1,000 years after the fall of the last Egyptian dynasty, found a nearly clean slate on which to inscribe their history with little reference to the old. Over the course of the last 400 years, our picture of the land of the pharaohs has been built up piece by piece, leaving plenty of gaps for the imagination to fill in. Paradoxically, in the twentieth century - when most of Egypt's past has finally been well documented - the more familiar and everyday it becomes, the more there is a desire to cling to the exotic, the mysterious, the impenetrable. This comprehensive and lavishly illustrated book unwraps the layered shroud of history to reveal both Egypts: the real land of kings and queens, officials and craftsmen, archaeologists and tomb-robbers; and the Egypt of the imagination, which has had a hold on Western culture since its origins in classical Greece - a hold that shows no sign of diminishing.
The Legacy of Ancient Egypt (Facts on File's Legacies of the Ancient World) Reviews:
Great book! 
2000-10-25 - This is one of the most interesting books on ancient Egypt that I have ever seen. The book begins with an excellent history of Egypt from prehistoric times through its conquest by the Macedonians. Along the way, there are many subsections on subjects from Aten through zoological gardens. Later chapters cover ancient Egypt's rediscovery at the end of the Eighteenth Century, and its influence on western civilization up to today.
This book has many excellent color pictures and maps, a good glossary and list of Egyptian gods, and an interesting list of all of the kings of Egypt. This is an excellent introduction to ancient Egypt, and an interesting look at a wrinkle in modern Western civilization. I highly recommend this fascinating book.
i thought it was fairly good 
2000-05-21 - it would be good for the reader who wants to learn more about egypt without reaaly getting too deep into the history & geography of ancient egypt
