For as long as I can remember I have been intrigued by a family mystery. Names such as Howard Carter, Tutankhamun, and Didlington Hall permeated my childhood along with phrases such as ‘a mummy’s curse’ and ‘financial disaster’. Something had happened years before I was born, which no one would discuss. As an adult I decided to search for the truth, and on the way found inspiration to fulfil a long held ambition, which was to write. I discovered that my family had played a vital, but often forgotten, role in Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun. Our story is of wealth lost, extraordinary characters, passion and tragedy, but through it all Egypt winds like a twist of golden thread.
Nile Cat is my debut novel and I was thrilled to learn that it had been shortlisted for the prestigious 2021 International Rubery Book Award. The story was inspired by my great grandmother, May Tyssen-Amherst’s memoir concerning her childhood trips to Egypt in the 1870s.
The story opens with fourteen-year-old Rose and her twin sister, Lily travelling to Egypt in 1871. At Naples, Mr. John Baxter, an Egyptologist, joins their ship. From that moment, wherever Rose is, there he is too, watching her, like a fox watches a rabbit. Rose grows ever more afraid. When she is given a small stone cat, her dreams are haunted by the unfolding tale of Miut, an ancient Egyptian temple cat, and Hori, the boy who cares for her. Past and present merge in the streets of Cairo and the deserts beyond. Rose knows she has Mr. Baxter to defeat and an ancient mission to complete. She and Lily must work together. The penalty for failure is death.
This was one of the first books I read when I began researching my family’s passion for Egypt, and it was one of the most interesting.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 his troops were astonished to find countless ruins, covered with hieroglyphs – but what did they mean? Being able to read the ancient texts would be the key to unravelling many of the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Determined to be the first to do so was 16-year-old Jean-Francois Champollion, the brilliant son of an impoverished bookseller. This book is a true story of adventure, obsession, and triumph over extreme adversity, and is well worth reading.
A vivid and superbly written account of the unravelling of one of the great intellectual puzzles, set against the backdop of Europe in the Napoleonic era.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his troops were astonished to discover ancient temples, tombs and statues, all covered with hieroglyphs - the last remnants of an unreadable script and a language lost in time. On their return Egyptomania spread rapidly and the quest to decipher hieroglyphs began in earnest.
Jean-Francois Champollion was obsessed with ancient languages from a very young age, and once he heard of the unreadable ancient Egyptian text he had…
I read this book just before I visited Egypt for the first time. I found Amelia’s description of travelling up the Nile during the winter of 1873/4 fascinating. In a few ways, Egypt has changed little since. There are still donkeys pulling heavy carts through the streets of Cairo, though now they are passed by speeding traffic. Small villages of flat-roofed houses still punctuate the banks of the Nile, but now many of those houses sprout satellite dishes like metal mushrooms.
Amelia vividly describes ancient sites, some of which are now badly damaged or destroyed, and is a keen observer of 19th century Egyptian society and culture. The pages are full of witty stories, detailed illustrations, and a deep love for the country. She devoted much of the rest of her life to Egyptology and the preservation of Egypt’s ancient monuments. Amelia was instrumental in setting up the Egypt Exploration Fund which in 1891, with financial support from the Tyssen-Amhersts, sent Howard Carter to Egypt to assist with the recording of the architecture, reliefs, and inscriptions before they were lost.
As enthralling as any work of fiction, A Thousand Miles up the Nile is the quintessential Victorian travel book.
In 1873, Amelia B. Edwards, a Victorian gentlewoman, spent the winter visiting the then largely unspoiled splendors of ancient Egypt. An accurate and sympathetic observer, she brings nineteenth-century Egypt to life. A Thousand Miles up the Nile was an instant hit in 1876, and is received with equal enthusiasm by modern readers.
Fans of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody Emerson mystery series will see similarities between the two Amelias. More importantly, A Thousand Miles up the Nile provides a wealth of background…
Over the years I have had great pleasure from the series. The main character, Amelia Peabody is a wonderful invention. She is brave, witty, loyal, independent – a sort of Victorian female Indiana Jones. There are romantic entanglements, along with a delicious mixture of murder, mystery, and suspense, involving every sort of skulduggery you can imagine.
Mostly set in Egypt, real characters such as Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter, and Gaston Maspero appear. I was amused to discover a William Amherst in Hippopotamus Pool who is described as ‘a young Egyptologist who has very little to do with the story.’
Genuine characters and events are mixed shamelessly with the fictional, and many of the stories are told with a comic tone, verging occasionally on the parody of authors such as Rider Haggard. These books do not pretend to be anything but entertainment, yet beneath the froth, they are well-researched. They appear to give a very real flavour of what it would have been like to be excavating in Egypt in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Amelia Peabody is Elizabeth Peters' most brilliant and best-loved creation, a thoroughly Victorian feminist who takes the stuffy world of archaeology by storm with her shocking men's pants and no-nonsense attitude!
In this first adventure, our headstrong heroine decides to use her substantial inheritance to see the world. On her travels, she rescues a gentlewoman in distress - Evelyn Barton-Forbes - and the two become friends. The two companions continue to Egypt where they face mysteries, mummies and the redoubtable Radcliffe Emerson, an outspoken archaeologist, who doesn't need women to help him solve mysteries -- at least that's what he…
This was my introduction to ancient Egypt. I was twelve when I was given this book. I was immediately entranced by the beautifully told stories not only of the gods, but also of magic, shipwrecks, princesses, and thieves.
Egypt is an extraordinary country entirely reliant for thousands of years on the annual inundation of the river Nile. If the water levels were too low there was starvation, and too high there were devastating floods. In some places, the fertile area is a little wider than the flight of an arrow. With life so precarious, it is not surprising that the afterlife became so important to all Egyptians and that they spun so many myths to explain the inexplicable, and give structure to their world.
This book is a great introduction to understanding the ancient Egyptians for anyone, but particularly for younger readers of 10+.
These stories include the great myths - of Amen-Ra, who created all the creatures in the world; of Isis, seaching the waters for her dead husband Osiris; of the Bennu Bird and the Book of Thoth. But there are also tales told for pleasure about magic, treasure and adventure - even the first ever Cinderella story.
I was immediately attracted to this volume of poetry, particularly when I realised that fragments from the original Tale of Sinuhe papyrus, had at one time been in the collection at Didlington Hall.
Professor Richard Parkinson introduces each poem from the Middle Kingdom and sets it in the context of its time. The Tale of Sinuhe is one of the most famous poems and was written around 1875 BC. It is an illuminating tale of adventure in foreign lands, but one in which Sinuhe reflects on life in Egypt and his relationship with the king. While The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is an entertaining account of fantastic and exciting adventures with a universal moral. These, and the other eleven poems provide fascinating insights into the minds and culture of the ancient Egyptians.
For someone who enjoys poetry and wants to experience the literature of these ancient people ‘first hand’, the book is a must-read.
The Tale of Sinuhe, from c.1875 BC, has been acclaimed as the supreme masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian poetry, a perfect fusion of monumental, dramatic, and lyrical styles, and a passionate probing of its culture's ideals and anxieties. This anthology contains all the substantial surviving works from the golden age of Egyptian fictional literature. Composed by an anonymous author in the form of a funerary autobiography the Tale tells how the courtier Sinuhe flees Egypt at the death of his king. Other works from the Middle Kingdom (c.1940-1640 BC) include a poetic dialogue between a man and his soul on the…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not…
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