Kingdom of the Nile

For three thousand years — longer than the span from Cleopatra to today — a single civilization endured on the banks of the Nile, raising the greatest stone monuments the world had ever seen and leaving behind a vision of eternity that still grips the imagination. Kingdom of the Nile tells the whole story of ancient Egypt, from the first farmers of the river valley to the death of the last pharaoh.

E.B Cohen traces the full arc: the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Narmer; the Pyramid Age of the Old Kingdom, when Imhotep raised the first stone monument and Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza; the cycles of collapse and renaissance; and the imperial New Kingdom of Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and his heretic sun-god, the boy-king Tutankhamun, and Ramesses the Great. It follows Egypt into its long twilight under Nubians, Persians, and Greeks, to the reign and death of Cleopatra and the coming of Rome.

At its heart stands a full account of the pyramids themselves — how they were built, by whom, and why — drawing on the latest evidence, from the workers' town at Giza and the four-thousand-year-old logbook of an official named Merer to the muon scans still finding hidden voids inside the Great Pyramid. The book closes with the modern rediscovery of Egypt: Napoleon's savants, the Rosetta Stone, Champollion's decipherment of the hieroglyphs, and Howard Carter's opening of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Sober, vivid, and grounded in the archaeological and textual record — and setting aside the pseudohistory of aliens and 'lost technology' for the real, more astonishing story — this is a single, authoritative, readable history of the civilization of the Nile, and of the monuments through which it reached for eternity.