A History of Ancient Egypt, from the First Farmers to the Great PyramidBy John RomerThomas Dunne Books, 2013 It seems like books on the history and archeology of Ancient Egypt inundate as regularly as the Nile; Sir Alan Gardiner's 1961 landmark Egypt of the Pharaohs has been buried in the same silt of scholarship that long before buried the great Jim Breasted's 1905 masterwork A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. It's only been five years since Barbara Mertz's very winning book Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, only two short years since Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, and it was only just last year that the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought out Diana Craig Patch's sumptuous anthology Dawn of Egyptian Art. At first glance, an epic undertaking such as that now coming from renowned Egyptologist John Romer – a grand, sweeping history of Ancient Egypt, presumably the whole weary trek from the muck of prehistory to the last gasp of Cleopatra – might seem almost willfully redundant.Not many pages of this first volume, A History of Ancient Egypt, from the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid, are required before Romer dispels such worries, and he does so not only through the kind of steep, fight-picking erudition that only apex scholars, as it were, can wield but also through a rarer and even more unassailable quality, one a reader would have to go all the way back to Breasted to find on this subject in English: a prose style so consistently clear and so often beautiful that, to paraphrase an earlier critic (who used the phrase originally about the prose of an explorer of a slightly different stamp), it rises up around the reader like the larks of morning.The accessibility of Romer's great undertaking is highlighted right from the beginning of this first volume, when the central question animating all Egyptology is given a wonderfully personal cast:

I vividly remember a moment, standing in the open courtyard of a Middle Kingdom tomb on the ridge of rock to the north of Hatshepshut's grand terraced temple, when I held the calm and perfect face of a fine-featured mummy on my open hand, before burying it in the warm dry sand. And all around me lay fragments of the most exquisite paintings, the debris of a splendidly decorated burial chamber that lay nearby, in the darkness of the open tomb. Clearly, these people had expended huge amounts of time and energy, intelligence and skill to make such things – but to what purposes? What on earth was it that they had imagined they were doing?

What on earth was it that they imagined they were doing? In 31 vividly-narrated and novelistic chapters, Romer attempts again and again to answer that question, starting in "the deep silence at the very edge of history" with the earliest known beginnings of organized society in Egypt, neolithic foragers and farmers living around Lake Faiyum some eight thousand years ago. This was long before the polish of the actual Kingdom of Egypt that came thousands of years later, and it's even longer before the glittering decadence that came thousands of years after the pinnacle. This was another world - almost literally, since the entire region had a very different climate than it has today. As Romer points out, however, there were some constants, including the most vital one of all:

That same vast flood gave life to the entirety of Egypt. Swelling once a year to twelve to fourteen times higher than its usual flow, its waters flooded the best part of the Nile Valley. Through all of ancient history and, indeed, until the last two centuries and the building of a series of retaining dams, there was no other water source in all of Egypt; no rain in the last five thousand years sufficient to sustain a single plant; nothing, other than this single river. All life flowed from the Nile and the rich organic sit it carried in its annual flooding, the product of season and heavy rains in the highlands of Ethiopia.

Patiently sifting the latest archeological evidence, Romer attempts to present an account of these centuries that's as free of preconceptions as possible. He takes readers on painstaking tours of pre-dynastic tombs and public buildings, tracing the growth of agriculture and animal husbandry and the growing "traffic in bright and pretty things." Eventually resplendent kings such as Sneferu and Khufu arrive when the scene is prepared for them, and as the book's concluding chapters unfold, readers get the sense of big elements aligning to give them - in the promised follow-up volume - something much more akin to the Ancient Egypt of all earlier histories, although by that point many old stereotypes have been exploded, and much happy doubt has been sown where for a century there's been only certainty. The main achievement of Romer's book is that it makes Ancient Egypt strange again.And as backdrop to it all, fittingly enough, there's the rhythm of the seasons. Romer's narrative can never stray far from the constant murmuring of the Nile in all its moods - moods which our author has clearly left his library and known personally:

In September, when the flood lay still and shiny right across the valley of the Nile and the Faiyum lake was twice the size of that of Galilee, there would be dew again, and dappled clouds in the bright blue sky. Then in October, when the floodwaters were starting to recede and the mornings were becoming cool and misty, sowing could have started. In later ages, Nile farmers tended to sow their muddy meadows in December and January, when the scorpions and snakes were hibernating and the evenings were occasionally cool enough to spin a gossamer of frost.

A History of Ancient Egypt can't be recommended strongly enough - and its sequel can't come fast enough.