Click Here To Purchase Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt 

Author: Barbara Mertz

ISBN: 0061252743

There is a subset of history books which deal with the daily life of ordinary people in far distant lands and eras. The best of these books combine an easy mastery of the facts as far as they are known with a style that is both evocative and easy to read. Barbara Mertz, who is a well-known and very successful author under the pen names Elizabeth Peters and Barbra Michaels, shows in this newly revised and updated version of her classic tome on life for the Egyptian people under the Pharaohs that she is more than capable of being one of the very best exponents of this art. Her book benefits from much of the research that has been completed since first publication in 1966 but she finds that her initial interpretations have rarely needed to be changed as a result. She observes, a little acidly, that a great deal of academic work on the subjects on which she touches is in the form of providing interpretations that her own views would act upon as Occam’s Razor. So, while others might speculate at length on the possible religious iconography and allegorical elements of cats appearing in domestic scenes in visual art, she prefers to argue that it shows some Egyptians loved their pets. This is a common sense approach that is guaranteed to be popular with the kind of readers who will choose this book over the perhaps less accessible academic tomes. On the other hand, it is also the kind of approach that may possibly lead to hissy fits among certain of my colleague academics who find it hard to accept the fame and fortune that non-specialists can achieve and especially when those popular authors disagree with their own hard-earned research conclusions. This is particularly the case with the disgraceful nonsense that is the 1421 book, the publishing success of which has been taken almost as a personal affront by some distinguished professors with many years of work at the chronicle-face.

Mertz’s earlier work, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs dealt with the great and the good of Egyptian society, more or less and Red Land, Black Land (the title deals with the desert and the fertile Nile soil) extends the coverage to the hoi polloi, insofar as this is possible given the comparatively slender body of real evidence that exists. The evidence that is there she deploys skillfully and extracts what lessons can be learnt from it, rarely going beyond that evidence without making it clear to the reader what is justified and what is a flight of fancy. Her writing is, in the very best meaning of the world, sensible. This is a book that will delight and educate all readers with an interest in the past and in societies with which they are not familiar.

Click Here To Purchase Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt

The above review was contributed by: John Walsh PhD:  Professor at Shinawatra International University CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews