Ancient Egypt
The scale of ancient Egyptian history is overwhelming. Americans (North and South) wrestle with the consequences of five hundred years of invasion, conquest, and settlement. Europeans argue over what delineates different phases of their history (modern, the rise of the nation-state, phases of the Renaissance, medieval, post-Roman, and so on). Well, that gets you back only 1500 years. Classicists pride their discipline on another thousand years. Egyptians look on, bemused. They go back 6000 years without breathing hard. Ancient Egypt (a deep and long category, obviously) represents a civilization that still fascinates us. Think pharaohs, pyramids, mummies, hieroglyphs, the Sphinx, the Nile, "King Tut." Children and adults love such stuff. I debated with myself whether to be a purist on Ancient Egypt and end my listings with Alexander the Great's conquest and the great era of the Ptolemaic dynasty, but you would miss so much in those 275 years leading up to the pragmatic and unimaginative Romans building their empire on Egyptian grain. I wanted to include the Pharos lighthouse, Alexandria and its library, Cleopatra. So I did, and I will. This page, these offerings, like the rest of Whistlestop, will be carefully curated and vetted and supplemented as I find and list interesting items.
Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century
Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century
A bold new history of the discovery of King Tut and the seismic impact it left on modern society.
When it was discovered in 1922, in an Egypt newly independent of the British Empire, the 3,300-year-old tomb of Tutankhamun sent shockwaves around the world. The boy-king became a household name overnight and kickstarted an international obsession that continues to this day. From pop culture and politics to tourism and the heritage industry, it’s impossible to imagine the past century without the discovery of Tutankhamun – yet so much of the story remains untold.
In Treasured, Christina Riggs weaves compelling historical analysis with tales of lives touched, or changed forever, by an encounter with the boy-king. Who remembers that Jacqueline Kennedy first welcomed the young pharaoh to America? That a Tutankhamun revival in the 1960s helped save the ancient temples of Egyptian Nubia? Or that the British Museum’s landmark Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972 remains its most successful ever? But not everything about ‘King Tut’ glitters: tours of his treasures in the 1970s were linked to Big Oil, his mummified remains have been exploited in the name of science, and accounts of his tomb’s discovery exclude Egyptian archaeologists.
Treasured offers a bold new history of the young pharaoh who has as much to tell us about our world as his own.