100 Books Like Principles of Egyptian Art

Barry Kemp’s The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its People takes full advantage of the best discernible city plan in all of ancient Egyptian history.

Using it, he presents the ancient city with both its glories and its warts, at just the time that Egyptian culture itself was undergoing a momentous disruption—or was it a transformation?—intellectually, religiously, and in the arts. His archaeological expertise brings striking insights, and abundant illustrations show us the city from multiple perspectives.

Line drawings from Amarnan tombs and temples bring genuine ancient Egyptian voices into the discussion. Kemp’s anthropological grounding, his straightforward but eloquent prose, and his sympathy for the ancients in their everyday lives make this a book you can almost inhabit yourself.

Jan Assmann’s Mind of Egypt surveys the intellectual and philosophical topography of Egypt from earliest times to well past “the ancient” and into the world of “late antiquity.” He can do this because, of course, of his great erudition, but also because it’s the serious intellectual or philosophical strains of Egyptian culture that he attends to.

The original title was Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, not inaccurately translated as “The Mind of Egypt”, but Sinn means a bunch of things, among them, the English word “meaning,” so another way of translating the title would give us Egypt: A History of (its) Meaning, and that would imply not only what Egypt means to us today, but also what “meaning” meant in ancient Egypt itself: how did Egypt think.

John Romer’s Ancient Lives, the Story of the Pharaohs’ Tombmakers, like Kemp’s book, is about urban life, but the urbs is not a city per se, but a village.

In this case, though, it’s the village of the workers who excavated, crafted, painted, and consecrated the great royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings, so this “village” is intricately related to a great city on the Nile. Romer had access to a cast of personalities sketched from documents, read off of limestone flakes, potsherds, and administrative and judicial papyri.

He resuscitates networks of gossip and brings us within earshot of personal rivalries and property disputes, uncovers an audacious tomb robbery along the way, and following the trial of its perpetrators. 

Royal Women of Amarna is the catalog of an exhibition of many years ago, but used copies are still available, and it contains some of the most fascinating images and commentary on the ravishing sculptures of women (and some men) from the world of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

Introductory material provides context, but the heart of the book is in four chapters written by a longtime curator at the Metropolitan Museum NYC, now emerita. They cover various aspects of portraiture discussing the startling changes in the representation of the human figure in the Amarna period (ca. 1353-1336 BCE), the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, from which Nefertiti’s iconic bust was recovered, and other aspects of the art and religion of the era.

The long history of pillage as an act of colonial conquest – Napoleon looting Egypt, Britain looting Greece, among many others – is well-told in this solid, historically grounded account. Why are so many of the world’s great museums filled with treasures from ancient civilizations? This book tells you how it happened, while also showing why countries stripped of their heritage are demanding it back. There are a few books out there entitled Loot: this is the one to read. 

This book is not about learning to read hieroglyphs so much as about understanding the relationship between hieroglyphs and Egyptian art. As hieroglyphs are pictures, the same pictures can be used in an artwork, as opposed to a written text. The author takes 100 of the over 700 hieroglyphs used in Egyptian writing, and shows how they are used in Egyptian art. He dedicates 2 pages to each symbol, with a written description and illustrations.

While this book is problematic in that it tries to posit ancient Egyptian art as “Western art”, it includes excellent articles by esteemed scholars of Egypt and Nubia as well as copious images of ancient art from the Nile Valley (Egypt and Nubia) and Greek and Roman art depicting Black people. Despite the incorrigible racism expressed in the Introduction, the scholarly articles included in the book are replete with detailed information about the Africans who lived along the Nile River.

Egyptologist Salina Ikram is the foremost expert on Egyptian animal mummies. She has performed mummification on numerous animals in order to better understand the ancient Egyptian process of mummification. This book is by a number of egyptologists. It is academic, but not difficult to understand. It gives information on different animals that were mummified, and the context in which they were discovered.

Firstly, because the authors are known to me as highly respected magical practitioners and, second, because using the Nile to represent the river of consciousness it offers up a comprehensive system for inner development not seen before. The Inner Guide to Egypt takes us on a voyage of discovery that never ends because its images keep popping into our imagination, long after we’ve put the book down. It was originally published by Thoth Publications (1991) and currently by Llewellyn (2010) but its appeal has never diminished for true seekers after the Egyptian Mystery Tradition.

The dates that Egyptologists use for most rulers are guesstimates, and there’s not one fixed dating scheme.

Just for instance, one reference volume gives 1334-1325 B.C. as the dates for King Tut’s reign. Another says 1332-1322 B.C. And yet a third another has 1336-1327 B.C.

How do you know which one to believe?

During the three decades I worked as a staff writer at National Geographic magazine, we relied on the king list that Baines and Malek published in this book.

I still consider it as the last word on dates for my own research. It’s also full of very helpful maps, diagrams, and descriptions of archaeological sites all over Egypt.