Books like The Treasures of the Pyramids — picked by fans

If you want to know more about the ancient Egyptians, look no further than their tombs. The ancient Egyptians built their stone sepulchers for eternity. Colored reliefs and paintings celebrated the king’s eternal cult, while elite, non-royal people recorded events of their everyday life and life in the hereafter. In this richly illustrated book, Dodson and Ikram offer a comprehensive view of ancient Egyptian mastabas, pyramids, and rock-cut tombs from Prehistory to the Greco-Roman Period and the meaning of their decoration. This book sits prominently on my bookshelf.

Books that examine the multiple meanings of ancient Egyptian tomb decoration in a number of tombs are depressingly rare. Hodel-Hoenes takes us on a tour of some of the most significant private tombs in the ancient necropolis of Thebes and discusses the content and symbolism of their colored reliefs and paintings in this profusely illustrated book. These tombs belong to high officials that served the king and many are not open to the public, which makes this book invaluable.

Another outstanding book in the Treasures series, this time edited by Kent Weeks. Written by a team of world-acknowledged experts, Treasures of the Valley of the Kings covers the greatest royal tombs, mortuary temples, and private tombs from the New Kingdom in brilliant color accompanied by informative text. Originally published in hardback in 2001 and reprinted in flexibound in 2020, the same text can be found in one of the best guidebooks of the Theban necropolis, The Treasures of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, also published by White Star. I always pack this guidebook when I’m leading tours.

This massive 540-page book offers the reader everything to know about ancient Egypt. A group of international experts wrote Egypt: The World of the Pharaohs, which covers funerary art, tomb architecture, sculpture, and painting in an easy-to-read, lavishly illustrated book. Additional chapters explore ancient Egyptian history, culture, and religion. Appendixes include lists of gods, sites, museum collections, and a chronology with names of rulers. Numerous printings in hardback and softcover cover the same territory at an incredibly low cost—an indispensable volume and a required book in my classes. 

It’s now pretty well known that the position of the three Giza pyramids exactly corresponds to the three stars of Orion’s Belt. The Nile even mirrors the Milky Way. As above, so below, don’t you know. But the incredible discovery was only published in the 1990s, by the one and only Robert Bauval. His discovery, and other new insights from him and Adrian Gilbert, are documented in The Orion Mystery. If there’s one man who will make you question everything you thought you knew about the land of the pharaohs, it’s Robert Bauval. You need to start reading his books. All of them.

In this book, Robert M. Schoch challenges the mainstream belief of mere coincidence regarding the prevalence of pyramids worldwide.

Schoch explores mysterious geographical and historical examples, from ancient Egyptians to Buddhists and the Mississippi Indians; Schoch argues that ancient cultures shared a common vision of these majestic structures. He believes ancient sailors from Southeast Asia spread the concept of pyramids throughout the world, even reaching the Americas.

Schoch presents a thoughtful, well-reasoned theory that proposes the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange. I really enjoyed Schoch’s thinking, supported by solid evidence from this Boston University Geology professor. 

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. 

The world of the ancient Egyptians was a world so permeated with magic, which controlled every facet of life that traces still linger in Egypt to this day. Dr. Jacq is an authority on ancient Egyptian religious texts and it was an encounter with these traces in the form of a family of snake-charmers, which kindled his interest in Egyptian magic. I particularly liked this Aris & Phillips version because it has an Introduction by Rosalie David and in later editions, it was omitted.

This book showed me how important it was for women to write ancient history and how different their interpretations of that history could be. Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra does full justice to her complicated subject and the fraught historical era she had to negotiate.

I appreciate how richly Schiff evokes Cleopatra’s world, from the palace in Alexandria she lived in as a child to the fleet she commanded in her last, fateful battle. Even more, I love how skeptically Schiff reads the ancient sources on Cleopatra and how thoughtfully she constructs her own more nuanced portrait of the powerful Egyptian queen.  

I bought this catalogue many years ago in the crowded, chaotic store that used to sell books just inside the front door of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

It remains one of the best sources for descriptions of artifacts displayed in the museum for many decades—everything from King Tut’s gold mask to lifelike statues of scribes, detailed models of boats, and illustrated passages from the Book of the Dead on sheets of papyrus.

Many of these artifacts have recently been transferred to the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) and other state-of-the-art facilities. I’m going to have to start noting in this book where my favorite things have ended up.