Tutankhamun

I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight. Callum Robinson would understand why this matters. A master woodcarver and cabinetmaker, plying his trade from a workshop in Scotland (location vague – ‘in a forest beside a loch nestled in the Scottish hills’), he

Following on from the volume in which he discussed the Middle Kingdom, John Romer’s new book considers the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom from 1550 BCE to 1070 BCE. This is generally romanticised as one of the great ‘golden ages’ of ancient Egyptian history in which the state reached its pinnacle of power. In this period of increasing prosperity, Egypt established an empire through a series of campaigns under kings such as Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Seti I and Ramesses II. At the beginning of the book, Romer takes us to the site of Tell el-Dab’a in the Nile delta, where excavators upended a whole series of assumptions about the early

In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from Nubia. Each bore the name of Tutankhamun — not that anyone had ever heard of him. All serious understanding of the millennia-spanning Nilotic civilisation had disappeared before the last hieroglyph was carved in 394 AD. In the mid-18th century the most advanced ‘scholarship’ on the subject consisted of ‘pinpricks of insight in an enveloping fog of misapprehension’, and by the early 19th century the Egypt of the pharaohs was still largely buried in the sand. The word ‘Egyptology’ did not exist. Yet within 100 years Egypt would no longer be