Product Description

This books covers the history of the Nile Valley from Nubia to the Mediterranean, during the period from the earliest hominid settlement, around 700,000 BC to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #208881 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Review
"Egyptologists frequently have little understanding of the prehistoric past, especially the paleolithic periods, and it is commendable that Midant–Reynes has included this overview." International Journal of African Historical Studies

"... integrate[s] the prehistory of Egypt and Nubia through into the (Egyptian) Unification period, thus investigating the entire united Nile region and its flanking deserts in a logical but rarely encountered attempt to develop a cohesive picture ... In this the book succeeds admirably." Journal of African History

From the Back Cover
This book covers the prehistory of the Nile Valley from Nubia to the Mediterranean, during the period from the earliest hominid settlement, around 700,000 BC, to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC. The author explores the prehistoric foundations pf many of the cultural traditions of Pharaonic Egypt.

The book focuses primarily on the fifteen millennia from 18,000 to 3,000 BC, when different cultures can be identified and the earliest forms of agriculture traced with some detail. Textile and ceramic production began at the end of the seventh millennium and were deployed with great skill and considerable sophistication by the beginning of the Predynastic Period at around 4,500 BC. By the Early Dynastic Period much that is considered characteristic of Ancient Egypt, such as cosmology and burial rites, was already established tradition.

This account of prehistoric Egypt will be welcomed as an outstanding narrative, combining both scholarship and accessibility.

About the Author
The author, Béatrix Midant–Reynes, is Head of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Toulouse (Centre d’Anthropologie, Université Paul Sabatier). She is also editor of Archéonil (a journal dedicated to the study of prehistoric Egypt and Nubia) and Director of the excavations at the Predynastic site of Adaïma (on behalf of IFAO). In 1986 she was Humbolt Stipendiatin in Staatliche Sammlung Ágyptischer Kunst’ in Munich.

The translator, Ian Shaw, is lecturer in Egyptian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He is the author of Ancient Egyptian Warfare and Weapons (1991), co–author of The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (with Nicholson, 1995) and co–editor of The Dictionary of Archaeology (with Jameson: Blackwell, 1998) and Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (with Nicholson, 1999). He also translated Nicolas Grimal’s A History of Ancient Egypt (Blackwell, 1992).

Customer Reviews

a thorough and thoughtful summary of Egyptian prehistory
This translation by Ian Shaw of Midant-Reynes classic book provides a thorough background to the field. She details each period with descriptions of sites and materials - and then explains how they all relate to each other. It is a wonderful scholarly read and a superb introduction to the period.

Great Overview of Egypt's Prehistory
This book is a fantastic guide to the prehistory of Ancient Egypt. It spans from the Paleolithic to the Predynastic Period. As a lay-person, I found some of the terminology a bit daunting. However, a short google search on some of the terms brought me up to speed quickly, and the book became quite a bit easier to read. This book does use quite a few archaeological and geological principles that someone who isn't initiated in either field may struggle with at first. However, I liked that aspect of the book. This is not an emotive narrative, it is very much a synopsis of fieldwork that was carried out up until the late 1990s when the book was added to (the original version is from the early 1990s). Also, what may be surprising to some readers is that this book was written from the perspective of an expert in Prehistory, so she has a view point that is very much different from most Egyptologists who deal with the Pharaonic Period. Most of her book covers times when people did not have writing, so the emphasis is exclusively on the material culture.

If you are looking into finding out what archaeology has uncovered from the beginning of its use in Egypt to the 1990s and you want to concentrate exclusively on the period before the Dynastic Period, this book is a must-have. It is wonderfully well-written and gives a rigorously scientific view of what was going on in Egypt during this span of time. If you want a book that reads more like a narrative that relies more on the spectacular finds and less on descriptions of stonetools and pottery, this book does not fit that purpose so well and another may be better suited to your needs.

Comprehensive text, but few illustrations
I agree with the above reviews so I won't duplicate what they say.

I would just like to add that if you are new to the subject it may frustrate you to find that there are very few illustrations of artefacts or sites, which as a novice may make it difficult to get to grips with some of the descriptions of lithics, ceramics and site plans. As a previous reviewer pointed out, this book is all about things excavated from the ground - the material record - and the lack of illustration may make it very difficult to visualize what is going on from one industry to another and from one phase to another.

The few maps are okay but they are tucked away at the end of the book, when it would have been more useful if they had been dotted throughout.

I would have liked to have seen a much more in-depth discussion of the different chronological schemes for the Predynastic period, and would have found it very useful to have seen much better graphic depictions of periods and dates.

Apart from the above quibbles (of which the lack of illustrations is the most serious), it is a good solid reference text, and an invaluable overview of the periods concerned.