Written by two distinguished Egyptologists, the book covers art, architecture, monuments, society, daily life, hieroglyphics, and the pyramids.

    They could own and trade in property, work outside the home, marry foreigners and live alone without the protection of a male guardian. Some of them even rose to rule Egypt as ‘female kings’. Joyce Tyldesley’s vivid history of how women lived in ancient Egypt weaves a fascinating picture of daily life – marriage and the home, work and play, grooming and religion – viewed from a female perspective, in a work that is engaging, original and constantly surprising.

    In addition to the colour illustrations, the book includes notes to the plates and an introduction describing the life and work of the author.

    An anthology presenting translations of sixty documents from a golden age of ancient Egyptian culture (c. 2081-1600 BC), the documents illustrate all aspects of life and the place of literacy in an early civilisation. The 'voices' range from the high formal literature of religious rituals and royal monuments to the hurried requests of the bureaucrats and the jokes of harrassed workmen. They tell a tale not only of the intellectual beliefs of the elite, but of family feuds, love and murder, as well as the pastoral dreams of a society trying to attain its vision of absolute order in a chaotic universe.

    Bailey has spent more than twenty years among the Bedouin of Sinai and the Negev, studying their culture and recording their poems.

    A phonetic version and definition are provided for each word, along with a helpful Index to English equivalents of Egyptian words in the text.

    Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels:  The denizens of the dark, narrow alleyways of Cairo, who struggle to survive the poverty; melancholy ruminations on death; experiments with the supernatural; and witty excursions into Cairene middle-class life.

    The pictures feature the great sights of Egypt including the temples and tombs of the pharoahs, the desert monasteries of the early Christians, and the mosques and capitals of caliphs and sultans, kheldives, kings and presidents. There are also images of natural wonders such as the mountains of Sinai, the Red Sea, the Nile and the desert.