The Eloquent Peasant

Although I’ve travelled to Egypt a few times now myself, it always interests me to hear people’s first impressions of the country, especially when they are less familiar with the ancient society. Lynn Barber has written a delightful article in the Guardian on ‘how she fell for Egypt’, and it gives a wonderfully fresh insight […]

I really love when a certain word has dual related meanings that reveal the way people understand certain concepts and make associations between them. I mean not just homonyms that sound the same, but ones that actually have a deeper connection between their different meanings. They’re called polysemes. An example in English would be ‘mole’, […]

To the Egyptians, ‘travel’ was synonymous with ‘water travel’, and the Nile acted as the country’s superhighway. Since Egypt was entirely strung out along the fertile riverbanks of the life-giving Nile that served as the country’s backbone, the majority of travel and transportation was north-south oriented and much time and energy was saved by using […]

I’ve decided that it might be interesting to share some of my favourite Egyptian words each week, so that even if you don’t read hieroglyphs, you can enjoy some of the flavour and character of the language that is often lost in translation.
The basis of certain words and the special ways in which they were […]

It has always pained me a great deal that so many people all over the world are genuinely fascinated by ancient Egypt and yet they are so woefully misinformed by sensationalist media, so-called documentaries based in pseudoscience, and the fantasy world of Hollywood. No other ancient civilization is so universally recognized and yet so thoroughly […]

London has always had a fascination with ancient Egypt dating back to the ‘Egyptomania’ of Victorian times and today the city is recognized as one of the foremost centres of Egyptological research. The collection of the British Museum is world renowned, as is its most famous exhibit, the Rosetta Stone. But there are many other […]

I stumbled across the weblog of an acquaintance of mine and found that he’d written a quite nice ‘History of Ancient Egypt in Ten Paragraphs’. It’s just a summary so obviously much is left unsaid, but it is still a good overview of an astonishing 3000 years of history.