Before the bling

If you read the first volume of John Romer’s A History of Egypt, which traces events along the Nile from prehistory to the pyramid age, you will understand why he thinks Egyptology is not a science. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to be exact about anything when most of your knowledge is based on deduction and when new discoveries can overturn accepted theories. In the 1,000 years covered in this second volume, starting around 2600 BC, would it be easier for Romer to present facts and express certainty — to be scientific?

One of the surprises of the pyramid age, as Romer explains very clearly here, is the lack of information concerning what people believed in and even how they lived. For while the Great Pyramid and its many neighbours from the same era stand as eloquent testimony to the capabilities of the ancient Egyptians, they tell us little about how or why they were constructed.